Dumb. Students of rich parents should not be given free meals.
I'm not in favor of means testing in general; but children are probably the one group I'm especially not concerned about means testing. How would that even work, do the kids need to bring their parents tax receipts /w them before being given breakfast/lunch?
Children deserve to eat, period. It really should be that simple and afaik in most first-world countries, it is... The nutritional value of school meals in the US is an entirely separate (and important) discussion but not going hungry while trying to learn is the most important thing.
Eh, I'm not opposed to this by any means, but free school meals are not the norm in other 1st-world countries either.
I lived in 2 European countries (France and Belgium), and you definitely had to pay for lunch. This isn't an issue like healthcare where the US is clearly outside the norms of the developed world.
And on that note, I've never heard of school breakfast, let alone free school breakfast. Schools definitely do not serve breakfast here (unless they're boarding schools ofc).
Huh, I did some research and you're right, and it's a weird assortment too... Countries like Finland and Sweden have had free school lunches for over half a century whereas Norway doesn't have any program. In France it said that the school pays for half and the students/family pay the other half for school lunches.
When do schools typically start in those countries? In the US I had to be on the bus by 6:30-7 and I know there's been a lot of talk about how early US schools start and how we'd be much better served by starting school later in the day. Obviously there isn't much time to eat a decent breakfast if you're leaving for school when it's still dark outside.
In any case, doesn't change how I feel about this issue obviously and we should absolutely make this a national initiative when possible.
In Elementary school back in my day would start around 8:30-8:45 AM; and in High school the day would start at 8:00 AM sharp.
But school would finish late. In elementary school I would finish at 4:45 everyday and I really struggled to do my homework as a result (overall I did well in school as I have a good memory and didn't need to study much, but doing my exercices and stuff I found hard). Tbf I only had a 4 day week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday) but at the time I would have definitely rather had school on Wednesday and finish earlier in the day, and I still think a 4 day week with such long hours is counterproductive.
Highschool really depended on which "stream" you were in (basically which major but highschool version, until the 2020 Reform there were 3: Scientific centered around Math, Physics and Biology; Economic Centered on Economics, Math and History; and Literary centered on French, Philosophy and foreign languages).
I was in the economic stream (basically middle of the road in terms of prestige, above Literary but below Scientific), so for most of highschool I had 8-5 days, but then in my senior year due to how my schedule played out I had 8-4 days. Which by that age is fine, especially given my natural ability at my classes other than math meant I didn't have to do much once I got home.
But the Scientific stream (the most prestigeous and difficult one) had 8-6 days and then had to do a bunch of work when they got home, that was a bit much. My brother (who was in this stream) was burnt out by the time he was done with highschool.
