School Lunch Has a Big Drawback: Kids Are Out of School for More Than Half the Year

what if it turned out that feeding kids breakfast and lunch at school was actually a bad idea now before you come at me i understand the reasons historically why school breakfast and lunch is provided and certainly we want our students to be well fed it's very difficult to learn when you're hungry but it is a historical accident that breakfast and lunch are provided through public schools.

And I think sometimes we get trapped in one way of doing things that is holding us back from something that would be a lot better.

And I think we could do a lot better than providing food through public schools.

And there are a couple of reasons for this.

On one hand, as an educator, I think it would be better not to provide food through schools because it would allow us to focus on our core mission.

And we've constantly been barraged with attempts at scope creep.

People want us to do more and more that we're not really here for, that we're not really cut out for, that we're not really trained for, that we don't really specialize in.

And every little thing that we pile on, like feeding kids, providing various other types of services, providing mental health care services, like all of these things that we could be doing to support kids would distract us from our core mission.

So that's one side of the coin.

The other side of the coin is we're just not very good at it.

And I'm not talking about the quality of the food.

I'm sure kids will always complain about the food that they're served.

But I actually think it would...

serve students better if we could serve them food outside of school.

And here's why.

We're only in school 180 days a year.

We only serve two meals a day.

What if students could get food any time of the year, any day of the year, any time of day when they need it?

What if they could call up a phone number or go online and request food if they don't have food in their house?

I think that would just be a much more robust way of providing food and assistance to families than to make everything go through public schools.

So again, I think we have to not eliminate something that's working in the hopes that something better will come along because we've seen that backfire.

So I'm definitely not saying we should get rid of school breakfast and lunch programs, but I do think we should try to imagine things that are not just a continuation of what we're already doing, but we should be willing to rethink things and imagine how they could be as good as possible if we're willing to rethink them.

And that means sometimes I think narrowing our scope, narrowing our mission so that we are doing only what we are truly here to do.

And to think of another example, school buses provide a service to parents that is costly and is distracting and it definitely takes up people's time and takes up money.

And we could say, well, is that truly related to the educational mission?

And in that case, I would say, yes, getting kids to school is part of school in a way that feeding them is kind of not.

And I'm not saying we should eliminate either one of these, but I think we just really have to make some very serious choices about which programs.

parties in our society, which agencies, which sectors in our society should provide different types of services.

Another example I was thinking of is flu shots.

We don't generally provide medical care in schools, and we don't generally provide vaccinations in schools, except when we're having some sort of partnership with a local healthcare provider.

You can get a flu clinic, parents sign a form, and their kid can get their flu shot at school.

I think things like that make a lot of sense because it's convenient for families.

And here's the important thing.

It's not permanent scope creep for the school, right?

We're not adding permanent staff in order to put on these flu shot clinics.

So I just want to continue the conversation about scope creep and focus.

We are educators.

We are good at a certain set of things.

And if we want to be the best in the world at those things, I think we have got to stay focused.

And that may mean beefing up other sectors such as public health, mental health, public nutrition, so that everyone can have the best possible outcomes.

Let me know what you think.