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Cuts in the California Budget Make For Cuts on Children’s Plates
By Ann Cooper —
I’ve been working on the Nutrition Services budget this week for the Berkeley Unified School District, and I’ve been thinking a lot about our state’s financial woes. The Berkeley community has been extremely enthusiastic about bringing healthy food to all of our students in the district. Over the past decade there has been support from parents, advocates, administrators, foundations, teachers, staff, school board members and the community at large — tremendous support! And yet as the state’s deficit widens, lunch ladies like me are being asked to cut and cut and cut again in an effort to help balance school districts’ budgets.
What does this mean for our children’s plates? It means less fresh food and more processed food, which means less healthy children, farmers and planet. Most schools use the state reimbursement to augment the far-too-small federal reimbursement in an effort to serve children healthy food.
I do understand the need for the state to have a balanced budget. But taking healthy food out of the mouths of our children is not the answer. In the past year, California’s prison budget has ballooned to over $10 million, which exceeds the entire federal government’s budget for the National School Lunch Program by more than 20 percent. At the same time, California’s meal program is slated to run out of funding by the spring, so the state is reducing its contribution to school meals from 21 cents (apparently our children are not even worth a quarter a day), to basically nothing for the remainder of the school year.
California State Assemblyman Tom Torlakson has introduced emergency legislation that would allocate $19.5 million for school meal reimbursements. That would prevent the state school meal fund from running dry and cover reimbursements for the rest of this fiscal year.
But even if that bill passes, the state of our school meal funding is still pretty dismal. We need to make our children’s health a priority! We need to come together as a community and demand that our legislators not only stop cutting funding for nutrition services, but go further and raise the state’s reimbursement rate. We need to prioritize the health of our children and find other ways to balance the budget without sacrificing the healthy food on children’s plates.
Come on. Aren’t our children worth at least a quarter a day, and for the entire year, not just for the first few months of the school year?
May 10th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Why is the state funding school meals at all? Feeding children is the responsibility of the parents. Do you follow them home and feed them there, too? How about the parents? Do you feed them, too? Wipe their noses?
May 13th, 2009 at 10:23 am
The State is participating in programs to feed children– all children– healthy food for the same reason it participates in public education: a healthy and educated population benefits ALL.