When it Comes to Lunch, Principal Knows Best? - Page 2
Clearly this is a neighborhood and a school that could use some help. With minorities at disproportionally high risk for childhood obesity, and seeing her students making unhealthy choices the principle felt moved to do something. When you are looking at an almost 100% low income rate you are dealing with students that have a lot of things to worry about outside of school, everything from where they will be sleeping that night to worries about crime, drugs, abuse, and with a mainly Hispanic population there are also issues of immigration and deportation. These are big societal issues that don't have quick or easy fixes but that do impact a child's ability to learn everyday.
The principle has very little she can do to solve those problems, but she saw a problem with her students that she could easily and effectively fix, getting them a better lunch, guaranteeing that one meal in their day was nutritionally sound. It’s easy for all of us sitting in our comfy suburban homes to criticizes her and get up in arms about her policy because it wouldn’t work for us or our schools. But this isn’t our home or our school, it 's theirs. This policy has been in place for six years. For six years it didn’t make the news, parents weren’t complaining, no one was tearing the principle down on the internet. For six years this policy was working for this school.
When you have the whole picture, the policy doesn’t look so alarming. That seventh grade student is starting to look less like a revolutionary trying to start a movement and more like a rabble rouser. He is more like the cocky kid who runs for student president on the platform that he will have pizza served for lunch everyday and install an ice cream bar. He gets the crowd riled up while the spotlight is on him but doesn’t have any plan to make those changes come to fruition. Unfortunately for this school and principle the spotlight happened to be national media. Now whether that spotlight helped or hurt this school, only time will tell.
Image: ningmilo / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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