As some of you know, someone close to me works for a very large school district here in Colorado. We had a very nasty period of ridiculously cold weather last winter. The roads were nearly impassable, and there was risk of frostbite just walking from your car to your office building. I was pretty angry, because this school district reopened after only being closed for two days in this weather. I felt the district wasn’t watching out for its employees, and wasn’t watching out for the students.
Then I found out why the district reopened so quickly.
As it turns out, there’s a rather large population of students within the district whose only meals are the meals they get at school. These aren’t kids who are going hungry from necessity, these are the kids who are hungry because their parents don’t bother feeding them, trade their food stamps for drugs, and won’t even haul their asses to the soup kitchen to feed their flesh and blood.
The district reopened early so that these kids would have a place to go, to be warm and have a decent meal.
I hate that our country has come to this, that expecting that the state will take care of your child because you refuse to has become commonplace. At the same time, I can’t fault the district for refusing to let children go hungry, and if the kids are eating at school then their parents can’t trade the food benefit for drugs. It’s not the child’s fault the parent is undeserving of the title.
Since the Chicago School District is shut down, who’s feeding the kids?
[...] DoublePlusUndead: AliceH brings up a good point with regards to the Chicago school closures. [...]
I think the schools are still open for breakfast and lunch. At least that’s what some news stories have said.
http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2012/09/chicago_teachers_begin_strike.html
That’s a relief! I hope the cafeteria workers aren’t getting grief for working during the strike.
See, I hope they are getting grief. Let people see how our fine, union friends really feel about Teh Children.
The only problem with that is that Minitrue probably won’t cover it (they spent much of the brou-haha in Wisconsin not covering the unions acting all uniony), so nobody will find out.
Haven’t heard about any grief for the cafeteria workers, but the janitors are planning to strike, at the urging of SEIU:
http://www.wbez.org/news/janitors-plan-one-day-solidarity-strike-teachers-102363
I wonder what schools the children, of the striking teachers, go to?
The problem is that to the union (not the individual teachers) the students don’t matter. Unlike what the union says, this is not about the children. Instead, it’s about the union holding a broke city at ransom to get more taxpayer money. Because, after all, a 16% increase (when you’re averaging over $70,000 a year – the highest average for a public school teacher in the country) just isn’t enough.