This story caught my eye this morning as another interesting aspect of the continuing assault (or shirking) of parental responsibility.  It is becoming more common for public schools to prohibit students from bringing their lunches to school.  Instead, they must either not have lunch, or buy the school lunch.  Rationale?  Some kids weren't bringing healthy lunches, therefore the school decided six years ago to force students to eat the healthy lunches the school provides.  

This is a public school.  While the story seems to imply that many of the students qualify for government-subsidized lunches, I would think that there are some kids who don't, and this would force their parents to pay $2.25 per day for the school lunch.  A single paragraph in the story addresses briefly the financial aspect of this.  A service provider is contracted to provide the lunches for the school.  The school receives money from the government for each subsidized lunch they provide, and the service provider gets a set fee for each lunch provided.  Curiously, there's no discussion of how this financial aspect pans out.  Is it a wash?  Does the government provide exactly the contracted amount to the school to pay the food provider, or does the school manage to make a few cents off of each lunch by negotiating a lower per-lunch fee with the provider?  Call me suspicious, but is this in part a way for a school to make a few extra bucks each year?   With education budgets squeezed tighter and tighter, I couldn't blame them.  And I'm pretty sure that regardless of their benevolent rationales for this policy, if the policy was costing the school money, they wouldn't be doing it.

But the main issue is that once again parents are being excluded from an aspect of their child's lives.  I won't make any argument that there aren't some (perhaps many, depending on the school district/neighborhood) who either aren't able to provide their kids with a healthy lunch, don't know enough about what that means, or just don't care about it.  Having lived three years in inner-city St. Louis, I know what most of those kids ate, and are undoubtedly still eating.  

I wonder if the school has considered offering seminars to assist parents in making healthier lunch choices for their kids?  And how does one evaluate what an improvement would be in this regard?  For a child used to eating bagged chips and sodas for lunch, switching to Lunchables or some other similar option would represent an improvement.  Yet Lunchables are hardly what many of us would consider healthy eating.  And then how are the school lunches deemed healthy?  It seems clear that not all the students enjoy the lunches, but that's not exactly news.  I ate home-packed lunches throughout my schooling days - including up through high school graduation.  On the rare times I had a school provided lunch, they were atrocious.  Something needn't be healthy to be unappetizing!

Similar to banning happy meal toys and other efforts that are gaining more momentum, the focus is not on education or empowering and supporting parents and families, but rather on increasingly reducing their influence by external mechanisms.  At what point do we decide that parents aren't doing a good enough job of clothing their children, so we demand that all children wear the same school outfit (I'm not against dress codes by any means, or even school uniforms, but more so the possible rationales behind them)?  I would think an even greater concern would be that many parents are unable to spend the time necessary with their kids to ensure they are doing their homework.  Should mandatory after school study sessions be required?  In that case, wouldn't it make sense to ensure that students received a healthy dinner, and require them to stay for that?  What about children that live in gang-infested neighborhoods?  Wouldn't it be better to require them to live on campus, boarding school style?

None of these issues or even solutions are bad in and of themselves.  It's what happens when they cease to be the decision of the parents and become the decision of the state that concerns me.