By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director
Recently in The New York Times, there was a sobering article about the current state of school funding. It was a story of school cutbacks, increasing classroom sizes, job losses, people being thankful for taking pay cuts. It didn't paint a good picture for the health of our school system, let alone the state of school health. And the punchline was that without the stimulus funding, it would have been significantly worse.
About half of the 160 school superintendents from 37 states surveyed [pdf] by the American Association of School Administrators said that despite receiving stimulus money, they were forced to cut teachers in core subjects. Eight out of 10 said they had cut librarians, nurses, cooks and bus drivers.
Health and nutrition services (beyond federal reimbursements) are being funded through the same dollars that provide education to our students. So particularly in a large urban district that has higher levels of poverty, a loss of money in a school food program has to be covered from a school's general revenue.
And if health has to compete with education, no one wins.
How can any administrator decide between cutting healthy food for kids and laying off teachers? There is no correct answer. The setup is just not right. It's not a question any school leader should have to ask.
I don't know what the answer is for health services, or bus drivers or facility maintenance, but I do know that properly funding the Child Nutrition Act at a level that enables schools to provide healthy meals will help schools that rely heavily on federal reimbursements avoid asking these impossible questions and watching children suffer no matter which answer they chose.
Imagine a school principal who doesn't have to worry about the school food service program losing money and draining their education dollars. This takes the pressure off of food programs and allows them to innovate and create healthy meals that don't rely on junk food to make up for lost revenue.
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