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School Lunch Story
July 10, 2001, 5:00 PM
by Reggie Aqui
Transcript
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Anchor Brooke Bradley: Still to come in this edition of Good Evening Wisconsin, school lunch programs are a normal fact of life in most school districts.
Anchor Tom Milbourn: Yeah, they're a pretty solid meal to make sure the children get something to eat while they're at school. But not all school districts offer a school lunch program. That forces some parents to ask why the neighborhood kids get to have their pasta and eat it too.
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Bradley: It's something many of us probably take for granted, school lunches. Last year 27 million students went through the nation's cafeteria lines.
Milbourn: Yeah, and some of them more than once during the course of the week and the month. Well, more than half of those students who use the school lunch program receive that lunch either for free or at a reduced price. It's a federally supported part of the program that school districts run that try make sure that children in low income families don't go hungry. But in one area school district it's causing a rather grownup lunch money fight. Here's Fox 11's Reggie Aqui...
Reporter Reggie Aqui: The lessons might be on vacation, the lunches are not.
Even in the summer, Green Bay students who might otherwise go without a good
lunch get one free from the school district. Most major districts run some form of
the program, but not this one.
Ron Kossik: The injustice of having children living in poverty be actually blocked from receiving a hot lunch, that was unacceptable to me.
Aqui: In fact a hot school lunch has been off the Manitowoc menu for about 30 years. For Ron Kossik, it's turned from an inconvenience...
Kossik: A Manitowoc Parable, Our hungry children need hot lunch said the parents...
Aqui: ... to a quest... mantyhotlunch.org.
Kossik: We can disagree on whether people living on welfare deserve it or not,
but I think we all agree that children living in poverty are not responsible.
MPSD Superintendent Dr. Wayne Johnson: You know, taking your thought process further, maybe we need to have free dental work for all the children in the school. And at what point do you stop?
Aqui: Manitowoc Superintendent Dr. Wayne Johnson is brand new to the district. He faces the lunch issue here for the first time; voters do not. Twice, they've turned down referendums supporting school lunch. Dr. Johnson says he's open to all ideas.
Kossik: This is going to be a long term effort.
Aqui: Ron Kossiks included.
Johnson: What we need as a society to decide is, is it the school's role, or isn't it.
Aqui: A question of how to allocate limited finances to unlimited potential. In Manitowoc, Reggie Aqui, Fox 11 news.
Milbourn: Reggie says that in Manitowoc, the biggest controversy is over startup costs because once the program begins, the federal government reimburses the districts for most of the cost of a school lunch program.