News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
No children here, and the article didn't give the average price of lunch. Google tells me it's about $3.
Not to deviate too much from the article, which seemed to focus on how school lunchrooms have adopted outside payment options that use a Ticketmaster inspired fee model, but the lunch "base price" at least is better than I had expected.
The "back in my day" price was 85 cents in the mid 80s to I believe $1.85 by the time I graduated high school in the late 90s. For it to have ok not gone up about 50% since sounds better than the price increase on many other things, especially with food prices of the last few years.
It's cheaper than the cheapest fast food meal and much less than my cheapest meal at work, while likely being nutritionally somewhere between the 2.
Any of you with kids have a more accurate real cost of feeding kids or more stories of these odd payment schemes?
If you're interested and don't hate John Oliver he did a pretty good breakdown on school lunches that will answer these and other questions. Want me to linky? Ill just linky. (26 minutes)
Thanks!
The payment scams aren't going towards food in any way. The tradeoff you're suggesting doesn't exist.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply it went to the food in any way, it seems a straight processing fee because we can thing. That's why I was surprised the list price of the lunch was only $3.
My $0.85 in 1986 converts to $2.44 and $1.85 in 1998 converts to $3.57, so if the price of lunch is around $3, that makes it seem like it has been inflation proof, at least for out of pocket cost. I'm sure property tax and state tax has subsidized it, but cost to kids/parents sounds like it's held flat.
My cheapest equivalent meal from the work cafeteria is about $10 while only being modestly higher in quality than what i remember school lunch being like,
Do you think it's possible that the price was forced to stay the same, and the difference is made up by using cheaper and lower quality food? You're assuming the quality and size of these lunches has remained the same and I have seen no evidence that suggests that's true.
They're limited by budget, and need to attempt to put together a menu for hundreds (if not thousands) of children with different, legitimate, nutritional needs. Every single day. It's an impossible task given the paltry amount they have to work with. The only way they could possibly do it while keeping the funding the same is by cheaping out on the quality of the ingredients.
I'm not doubtful about that either. I've seen a few posts over the years of some pretty sad looking lunches, and I seem to recall something about trying to pass off pizza as a vegetable, so I'm sure there's been shenanigans and corner cutting.
At the same time, I hear friends talk about all the extra supplies kids need to bring these days, and my brother was complaining this week his kids needs dedicated gym shoes to leave at school, so they didn't seem to be detected from passing along costs to parents anywhere else.
Right, but you do understand the difference between gym shoes, and life preserving sustenance needed by growing children in order to develop properly right?
And you do understand that there are millions of parents who can not afford those gym shoes right? And their kids probably get ridiculed for it, if they're even allowed to participate (there's that social stigma again).
So they may be passing the cost of some things on to parents, but that doesn't mean that's how we should be doing it. Because the real life result is that millions of children go hungry (and get ostracized for it), which in turn, hinders their ability to learn.
My point is, the parents that cannot afford to pay for their child's lunch (and often breakfast in these cases), sure as shit can't afford "gym shoes," so it's not really relevant. It's just one more thing we have no excuse for not paying for.
And let me just point out that it's the teachers who are the ones who have to pay out of their own pockets for supplies for their classrooms. That is just so fucking backwards, especially given how little we pay them.
I believe we are having a miscommunication. You seem to be a bit upset at me, but I feel I'm in agreement with your points.
I feel public schooling should be a free, all inclusive experience for all kids. The schools should provide all the materials, and they should make sure kids are growing up healthy despite whatever their home situation should be. It is something I support my tax money going to even though I do not have kids and never will.
I'm supportive of free school meals. I don't think I'd much like someone who didn't think kids are entitled to eat.
My best friends are teachers, my ex is a teacher, and I've known a bunch of others through my adult life and know how screwed they get by school funding as well.
My original question was just wondering out loud why school lunch price does not seem to have risen much with inflation. I didn't know if they are getting less food, cheaper food, or what, and I thought some of you may have kids in school and could educate someone asking a question so they can form an accurate take on things. I don't have my own kid to ask, that's all.
Thanks to a working state legislature, school lunches are now free in Michigan. Before that, it cost about $2.50 for a high school lunch. Kiddo needed to either take cash daily, I had to load his school account, or he packed lunch from home. He liked to eat school lunch. We are fortunate that we can afford that. If I didn’t load his account from their website, and If the account went negative too long, he wasn’t allowed school lunch.
Sending cash with him was how I handled it but it usually took him going negative and the lunch workers telling him he was negative for him to remember money in his backpack. If I loaded his account from the website, there was a “convenience fee” of $3 or $4.
My school district in Florida uses a payment service called "My School Bucks". I use it to reload the cafeteria account, but also to pay for other things like before and after school. So far they haven't charged a use fee. Lunch is about 3.25 (my kid doesn't buy it often), but breakfast is free.
That sounds pretty reasonable. I like seeing "Go Florida!" moments now and then.
Their site says they service about 30,000 schools. It's good it can be used for multiple things as well and the kids don't need to worry when they forget to bring money. I always hated when I forgot to bring it.