Does Free Lunch Come at a Price?

                Free lunch programs have been implemented in schools across the country.  At the surface, a free lunch system for students may seem like an incredible solution for students coming from homes that cannot afford to pack a nutritional lunch for their children.  It may all seem too good to be true, that's because in most cases it is. Students who are receiving these free school lunches can face the social stigma of being the "poor kid".  Along with stigmatization, students are not having their nutritional needs met by these lunches in comparison to their classmates who are bringing lunch from home. 

                Free lunch does not exactly mean free lunch anymore.  When we hear about the percentage of students who receive free lunch we do not think about the positive aspect of children eating in the middle of the day, we think of the socioeconomic status of that school or district.  Students who receive free lunch at school have become nothing more than a statistic.  Every student who receives a free lunch has a marker on his or her back declaring that he or she is coming from a low income home.  Bruce Baker, an education researcher at Rutgers University tracks education data and made the statement that "people should recognize that free and reduced-price lunch is a helpful, but limited, metric. "It ain't great, but it's what we've got, and it is predictive of what we want to know about student outcomes." 

            Students are labeled all the time.  When it comes to academic status, social status, and economic status, children bear the burden of carrying baggage that they may not have created for themselves.  Children are reduced to the scrutiny of their peers and educators and they are not ignorant to the judgement placed upon them by society.

            Now I would like to discuss the kinds of foods that lunch programs are feeding to their free lunch students.  It is clear to students that they are all different.  Some identify themselves with the lunch packed with love by parents and others identify with having no choice in the unhealthy and unsatisfying school lunch that they receive.  Below, I've posted a video created by students who are declaring that THEY ARE HUNGRY!  The school lunches that they are receiving do not meet their dietary needs and they are more than aware of that fact.

            Through personal experience I have seen student get the short end of the stick over and over again.  While student teaching in a refugee community I realized that most of the refugee students were not eating at lunch.  Their families did not have the money to send them to school with prepared lunches, but the free lunches these students were receiving were unfamiliar and in most cases gross to them.  I asked some of the refugee students from Nepal why they were not eating their cheeseburgers and through broken English they told me that they have never seen it before, they were not sure if their parents would approve, and they were disgusted by the appearance and smell.  These students were not only being ostracized by their peers due to misunderstanding in language and social cues, but because they were not eating a "normal" American favorite.  

Works Cited:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IB7NDUSBOo

Huntsberry, W. (n.d.). True Or False? Free And Reduced-Price Lunch = Poor. from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/01/30/379330001/true-or-false-free-and-reduced-price-lunch-poor