My mom cried as a first year teacher when she realized many of her students were food insecure. She put a snack pantry in her class and has had one ever since.
My sister cried with anger as a first year teacher because of how few of her students grew up without being exposed to violence, poverty, and neglect.
My dad didn’t cry as a first year teacher, but was convinced he was the worst teacher ever for 4 years straight. (He wasn’t)
My aunt was exhausted for the first year because her students were convinced she’d only be at their school for one year and then move to a better paying school district like all of their other new teachers. She spent the entire time teaching, actively gaining trust, and calming anxieties.
Some of these things are not technically school related, but have an impact on students in the classroom. As new teachers, my relatives got varying levels of support. New teachers need better support.
3 quit at my old job because they didn’t feel like they were getting the pay or support that was appropriate for what they were doing in the classroom. All of the teachers I have encountered pay for many of their own supplies. Many take time before or after school to check up on students they feel are at risk.
There are teachers that have students live with them or end up fostering students. My mom fostered 2 students and had another 2 live with us.
What many teachers do on the job isn’t as supported as it could be. They aren’t paid like they should.
Did I mention that a lot of the first year teachers I have worked with qualify for SNAP benefits and/or WIC? 😦
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Re: Why Teachers Provide Snacks (at my work)
ALL of the teachers I work with at my school provide snacks to students.
We’re a Title I school. This means almost all of our students are food insecure. It’s unreasonable to expect food insecure families to provide their own snacks to school.
ALL of the teachers and many of our other staff members provide snacks for their classrooms or offices. Our counselor has snacks in her office. Our health room assistant has snacks in her office. Our principal has snacks in his office. Our vice principal has snacks in her office. The office professionals have small snacks available as well.
Our new teachers usually can’t afford to do this, so veteran teachers and support staff often chip in.
When students DON’T have access to snacks, they get tired. Our students can’t focus. Students get irritable. They’re feeling the effects of hunger and cannot focus on their work. We see escalated behaviors because kids are hungry.
Providing food not only prevents some problems from happening, but it’s The Right Thing To Do.
Many of our students’ Only Guaranteed Meals are at school. School meals are not designed to provide a child’s only source of nutrition. The caloric value of school lunches isn’t enough. So—Kids get snacks with lunch. Kids get multiple ‘breaks’ (which they think are ‘‘regular breaks’‘) for snacks.
Anyone who wants a small snack will get one.
We have a Friday Weekend Bag Program, but many families HATE THOSE. Those snack bags come from the Thurston County Food Bank. They only contain shelf stable food since many of our families don’t have a reliable way to cook things. Most of the families decline the bags because the Instant Noodles, Dry Granola Bars, and Vegetable Soup aren’t what they’d eat anyway.
__
A lot of the kids DO want fruit/vegetables. (Downside is if they can’t store those at home). We have some kids who try to hoard milk. <—a problem since many kids don’t have access to reliable refrigeration at home! Our milk ‘‘collecting’‘ kids ALL don’t have reliable refrigeration since they’re in living situations that don’t have refrigerators or freezers.
We provide snacks for the kids because we need to.
My Personal Project this coming school year is connecting My School with local nonprofit Fairshare Food Share Resource. It’s a group of volunteers who harvest small amounts of fruit and vegetables and give them away. They’re for smaller home gardeners who aren’t up for sending items directly to our food bank system due to time/health issues/etc.
The Thurston County Food Bank is expanding our school garden this year. I’m hoping that the garden will eventually be a nice Community You Pick for our students and the surrounding neighborhood.
The last big ol’ update had links. I’ll add links to this because food insecurity TICKS ME OFF. It shouldn’t be a thing. We’re fightingfood insecurity at my elementary school.
“Schools have always been the front line in the battle against
childhood hunger. It started with the National School Lunch Act, signed
by President Truman in 1946, which gave federal money to states to fund
school lunches.
Today more than 30 million kids benefit. And yet,
by some estimates at least one in six still doesn’t know where the next
meal is coming from.
“School
lunch is no longer this Brady Bunch convenience; it is a soup kitchen,”
said Jennifer Ramo, of the New Mexico anti-poverty group Appleseed.
“It
is a place where kids who haven’t eaten at night or haven’t eaten that
weekend, go to get basic nutrition so they can function. I think
we just have no idea how big the problem is and how many children are
suffering. And the best thing to do is just must make sure they’re fed.”
“What do parents tell their kids on the first day of school – stay
out of trouble, do your homework, and listen to your teachers,” Nelson
said.
“That’s our message today: listen to your teachers. What are they
telling us? Hunger needs to be a national priority.”
One in five children struggle with hunger nationwide and six out of
ten teachers report students regularly coming to school hungry. According to 80 percent of those teachers, the problem is only getting worse.
Educators realize the toll hunger takes on students. Nine in ten
teachers consider breakfast to be “extremely important” to academic
achievement. Fifty-three percent of teachers spend an average $26 of
their own money each month providing snacks for their students.”
“There
is tremendous stigma of children going into a cafeteria before the
bell,” said McAuliffe, “whereas with the alternative breakfast model, it
normalizes it, creates community in the classroom around a meal, and
starts the day off strong.”
Underscoring the crucial impact a
healthy breakfast can have, a 2013 study done by Deloitte for No Kid
Hungry found that kids who have regular access to breakfast score 17.5
percent higher on standardized math tests
.Breakfast and lunch
programs in schools are making great strides in attacking childhood
hunger, but a huge gap remains. According to No Kid Hungry, a quarter of
all low-income parents worry their kids don’t have enough to eat
between school lunch and breakfast the next day; and three out of four
public school teachers say students regularly come to school hungry.
Increasingly, advocates are focusing on programs that ensure kids have
enough to eat when they are not in school, and after school and summer
meal programs are on the rise.”
Yep. My school is poor enough that it has all the kids on free breakfast and lunch, and nearly every teacher has a box of protein bars or fruit snacks or something to give to hungry kids in their classroom. We all buy them with our own money. How fucked are we as a society that this is pretty much normal at all the poorer schools?
A lot of our school funding is through property taxes. Low income areas have lower taxes which means lower funding for their neighborhood schools. It sucks.
Schools in high poverty areas are Title I schools. Almost every school in my district is Title I.
ALL public schools should be properly funded and NO ONE should be food insecure. (my 2 cents)
When someone disagrees with you online and demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a complete and logically sound defense including citations, you can save a lot of time by not doing that.
Bro, I’ve known you for twelve seconds and enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
This got a lot of responses from people pointing out that evidence is a key part of intellectual inquiry, discourse, and debate. That being able to support your beliefs is a key critical thinking skill. Which is 100% true.
Except that you don’t actually have to participate in intellectual discourse any time some fucko on the Internet tells you to.
There’s a vast difference between “this is an important thing to be able to do,” and “this is a thing that you must be continuously available to perform in public for any stranger who asks.”
Making fun of girls who dream of being a wife and stay-at-home-mom actually doesn’t make you progressive or feminist or cool, it just makes you a person who shits on someone else’s dream, a.k.a an asshole
I WILL ALWAYS REBLOG THIS
Always important to remember; the enemy of feminism is not a particular lifestyle, the enemy of feminism is to not be able to choose.
You can really tell who’s never experienced poverty and food insecurity when it comes to discussions around food costs and how unhealthy food is cheaper. Some fucker always comes in with the price of like… lettuce or… apples. And it’s like yeah bitch but can you work an 11 hour shift after eating some salad and an apple!?! Find me something cheaper, and more filling than the broke ass staples of boxed mac and cheese, hot dogs, noodles, bread, beans, and rice. I’ll wait.
It also ignores the mental toll that poverty takes like maybe your home made veggie filled recipe isn’t crazy expensive but it also involves prep time and cooking time and organization in terms of fresh food that a lotta poor people can’t manage.
Not to mention if you can only afford to get to the store once every couple weeks via bus or cab then you can’t keep fresh veg on deck.
But ya know.. poor people are just dumb and lazy.
People reblogging this with “actually you can do this super labour intensive prep and only buy bulk which means more money on grocery day and all this storage space you defs have when you’re poor” and it’s like……… did you read this at all
And all the “well actually” replies on this post operate from the assumption poor people haven’t thought of these things…. or don’t know any of these things or are too lazy which I mean was my original point and people just continue to prove it …..
I say it all the time but I’ll say it again .
This one quote from a book about a turn of the century poor family : “only the rich can afford to be thrifty.”
Seriously like something ppl don’t under stand: to save money for the long run, you gotta have disposable income and time.
Let me introduce you to the Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
Got $100 that you can spend on grocery day? You can afford to buy nutritious bulk items that can be eaten little by little throughout the week, with enough leftover to store in your pantry until a recipe calls for it. You have the option of using up ingredients from last week, because they’re still sitting around, so you can build a pretty huge collection of foods and options to choose from.
Honey, flour, sesame seeds, quinoa, coconut oil, butter, chickpeas: It’s all good! You can make some bangin’ dinners just from those pantry foods alone!
Only got $40? You have to buy single servings, and all-in-one packages that will be eaten every day until they’re all gone, just in time for your next shopping trip. Nothing is going to be saved, no extra ingredients can be afforded, and you’re consuming everything that you immediately buy. No mustard, no cooking oil, no salt or pepper, no vinegar: You can’t afford them, since you need filling and satisfying food food each week, so these pantry items keep getting pushed to the side. And it’s not like you can cook any sort of impressive recipe without this stuff, so it looks like you’re stuck with processed foods until you get some extra cash and manage to restock your fridge.
It’s a cycle that you get stuck in, for better or for worse.
The comments on this poet are filled with white nerds being misogynistic lmao, surprise
I know. So many angry white nerds in my inbox after posting this, its hilarious. So here’s some more excellent commentary since the Hardwick story broke:
wupacing 