Funding for food?

I do not usually write on policy not directly related to education, but this blog is about education reform, and I have just become aware of some rather absurd funding restrictions that may be harming education.

This article discusses new Federal guidelines on how schools handle food.  According to the article, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has started restricting food related school funding for schools that are not regulating not just food offered by the school but also food prepared for students by parents.  Now, I do not want to focus on the rather blatant privacy and freedom concerns this brings up, but seriously, what free government thinks they have the right to force schools to regulate food that they have no control over?

There are still three concerns I want to discuss.  The first, which has already had some press coverage, is that many students are either getting off of the school lunch program or refusing to eat the healthy food included in compliance with Federal mandate.  According to a U.S.A. Today article, $3.8 million in produce is being thrown away annually by students who choose not to eat the mandatory fruit and vegetable servings.  They say you can bring the horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.  Well, the Federal government is forcing schools to waste $3.8 million bringing the metaphorical horses to water, when they know they are not going to drink it (or at least they could ask).  No wonder our schools are having funding issues.

That brings up the second concern: Since when is it ethical to base school funding on nutrition?  I thought the primary responsibility of schools was education.  Admittedly, most of the funding that is restricted by this is funding paying for school lunch programs, but this is still absurd.  Instead of wasting government time, effort, and money trying to force schools to worry about things that they really have no business worrying about, maybe the money could be spent teaching children about nutrition better.  This makes far better sense, since teaching is what schools are supposed to be spending their effort on anyway.

The third is directly related to the first.  Many of the students getting off of the school lunch program in response to this were participants in free lunch programs.  These are students that have a difficult time getting sufficient nutrition in the first place.  Likewise, students that are staying, but throwing away the less desirable but healthier foods are getting less to eat, because the healthy foods are displacing some of the other foods.  This might just sound cruel, but it gets worse.  Poorly fed students do not learn as well as students who are getting enough to eat.  This Federal mandate is not only interfering with funding, it is interfering with students' ability to learn.  I want to stress again, the primary  responsibility of schools is education.  Now schools are being manipulated into giving nutrition a higher priority than education.  No wonder our education system is doing so poorly.  Our government has given it so many extra responsibilities that it is surprising it functions at all.

In my opinion, the best way to solve this problem is to increase welfare benefits for families that qualify for free lunch programs, and then do away with school provided lunches altogether.  Providing good nutrition is not the responsibility of the education system.  Let parents deal with their own responsibilities, but make sure they have the funding to do it.  The only role schools should play in nutrition is teaching it.  Education is, after all, the reason they were created in this first place.