Wednesday, March 5, 2008
free lunches
i was reading an article today in the New York Times which was talking about how many people are choosing to skip lunch in their school because they qualified for free lunches but didn't eat them out of embarrassment. this makes sense to me in a way since my high school's lunch set up was similar to theirs in the sense that the cafeteria with free lunches was in one building and "the hut" as it was called in my high school was located outside next to where all of the popular people ate. i never really noticed this when i was in high school because none of my friends were eligible for free lunches and the ones who were usually went there n took the burgers and came outside and ate with us since the burger we paid for were identical to those which were free. i remember being angry that i had to pay 2.50 for the exact same burger and fries which over 90 percent of my school got for free. if i qualified for free lunch i wouldn't have been ashamed i would've been stoked that i no longer had to waste my lunch money on lunch, actually i probably would've been even bigger cause knowing me i would've eaten the free meal then gone n bought candy or something...
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2 comments:
I was totally poor in high school but somehow I didn’t qualify to get a free lunch. Too bad… At my high school kids were so afraid of what other people thought, they wouldn’t pick up change they dropped at the lunch line- pencils too. One day I forgot to pack a lunch and I was starving. I went to the area where students dropped change and gathered enough to buy an order of fries. Peer pressure in high school is insane. I can see why many students don’t want to advertise their poverty in front of their affluent buddies.
YOU SHOULD HAVE GONE TO MY SCHOOL MAN! Free lunch was a big deal in high school, since soo many kids qualified they rationed out tickets to everyone. I can remember that there were all kinds politics attached to them. Since the tickets never expired and the lunch lady didn't mind seeing the same kid twice people would trade them for rides, money and even fries at Macdonald's when we ate off campus.
During the football season when i was trying to put on some weight i would buy other people's free lunches for a couple bucks, it wasn't an easy sell though, the cafeteria made a mean chickenwich.
Then half way through the year, after the state wide testing the schools in our neighborhood also got free breakfast after first period. We would line up, eat breakfast and try not to get caught talking during "silent sustained reading" The entire district scored soo low on the math and reading proficiency tests they figured it was because nobody ate before school.
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