Schools face lunch and snack cuts
With gentrification happening in fits and starts all over town, new average income figures mean many schools can no longer offer cheap lunches and free snacks – even if many of their students still come from poorer families with few resources. This is the second time I’ve seen this reported, but these are man-made rules and can be changed if they’re causing hardship.
Ian 11:23 on 2019-05-08 Permalink
I hear what you’re saying but schools have to jump through a lot of hoops to get allocations that are largely determined at the provincial level. You haven’t seen a bureaucratic machine at work until you’ve met the Ministry of Education.
It took me a year and a half to get my degrees recognized by them – awarded by Concordia and McGill Universities, so no interprovincial paperwork – which affected my payscale to the tune of about 135%.
Another example, my kid has an IEP – we had to get a recommendation from the school psychologist (good thing we go to EMSB as CSDM doesn’t have this in their budget anymore and we would have had to go private to the tune of about 250 bucks unless we waited for availability via CSLC, about a year and a half waiting list) which allowed us to go to out pediatrician (again, we are lucky we have one) which allowed us to go to the Children’s and get a full assessment (9 month waiting list) and finally when we got all that done the school was given a dossier number that all owed the EMSB to allocate IEP resources from the Ministry of Education. That took about year and a half, which was a lot faster than many other parents I know whose kids have IEPs. So basically your kid is flagged as having problems in school and you have to go through 5 levels of bureaucracy over the space of years before anything can be done by the school – at which point of course the problems are even more serious. Also worth noting there is Ministry funding for primary school psychologists but not in-school guidance counsellors, where at the high school level it’s the reverse. We just got a psychoeducator through the CLSC a couple of months ago, almost 2 years after we started this process. It’s no surprise that many parents simply don’t bother and hope for the best, especially from many low-income families where they don’t have the time and school is already seen as an annoying burden.
The big question here is what the solution could be – but it isn’t going to be determined at the school level unless we rejig the whole system. The problem is that the Ministry oversees everything because historically kids in the cities got all the funding but country kids got nothing, which is why we see such low adult literacy and high school completion rates, which feeds into all sorts of other social inequalities. The Ministry has this bureaucracy in place to help alleviate that injustice – but because it administers provincial-level rules the trickle down to individual schools is super slow and the inherent problems of bureaucracy become evident.
Short of switching to a district tax base approach like the US or a soviet system there’s not a lot of options besides a clunky bureaucracy on an administrative level – but realistically, we have social options. If you are a well off person in an historically low income district, maybe you could organize and contribute to a school lunch program funded by some kind of school drive. It’s done for school trips, legally and within Ministry guidelines. Parents already have to pay for lunch monitors in all school boards unless they are on social assistance so there’s no additional cost or adult supervision issues.
Effectively, it comes down to the well off parents taking their time and social capital and using that to effect positive change within the school. It’s the least they can do as gentrification penance.
Ian 11:36 on 2019-05-08 Permalink
n.b. IEP = Individualized Education Program (ASD, ODD, dyslexia, developmental issues, etc. – formerly “special needs”)
Kate 10:51 on 2019-06-30 Permalink
Ian, I never thanked you for writing all this out last month, so thank you!