Here’s a Good Reason to Homeschool

Your kids won’t get bugs in their food…

Yes, that is now happening in public schools. Baylen Linnekin writing at REASON magazine has the details:

Earlier this month, seventh grader Madison Smith and some of her middle school peers at Madisonville Public School in Madisonville, Tennessee, found what appeared to be maggots in granola sold at the school. The good news, I guess, is that the bugs may have been mites instead of maggots, and the school apologized and assured concerned parents in a Facebook post that such problems wouldn’t happen again.

The bad news, besides the fact kids found bugs in their food in the first place, is that at least one more student found a bug in his food just days later, after the school system had assured parents it’d solved the problem. The bugs led angry parents to call out the school board at a previously scheduled meeting.

It’s not just bugs but lunches of questionable nutritional value that are approved by the federal government:

These parents are hardly the only ones angry about school lunches. In Greenfield, Indiana, reports indicate parents “are upset after they say their children were served two breadsticks as their main entrée for lunch this week.”

The state defended the practice, saying it jives with USDA school-lunch rules because the school also served a protein with the breadsticks, namely a cheese dipping sauce.

“Cheese, per the USDA, is considered a protein and therefore we see schools that offer that sometimes as a protein,” said a spokesman.

The practice seems widespread. Other schools that participate in the USDA school lunch program in Indiana engage in similar practices.

The problems with school lunches go back decades and can not be blamed on Donald Trump or Michelle Obama:

According to federal government data,” I report in the book, “the USDA School Lunch Program served 258 million fewer lunches in 2014 than it did at its high point, in 2010. The number of students paying full price for school lunches today—now 8.8 million— is at its lowest point in recorded history. That’s a drop of more than 50 percent in full-price lunch sales since 1970.”

You could blame these poor outcomes—or today’s school lunch menus that serve kids unfathomable foods such as chili crispitos—on the Trump administration, which rolled back recent school-lunch reforms driven by then-First Lady Michelle Obama. But, as I detailed in a 2014 column on Mrs. Obama’s reforms, the new and improved lunches developed under her watch featured such nutritious lunches as whole grain pepperoni pizza, hot dogs with tater tots, and whole grain chicken nuggets with blueberry bread.

In other words, school lunches have been lacking no matter whether Democrats or Republicans are/were in charge. Today, though – thanks to a rollback under Trump’s USDA of the Obama-era rules – school lunches have been restored to what they were before Michelle Obama’s reforms made them “differently” bad.

Read the whole article here.

Maybe the solution is to get the federal government out of the school lunch business—along with every other aspect of education?

If you’re interested in conducting your own education, check out the Ron Paul Curriculum.