Dear folks in charge of the decision making down at the School District,
I wanted to write again to make sure you were all still awake and paying attention, since it seems like you aren’t…
We are on school day 236 of our two-week quarantine to flatten the curve on this COVID thing, and school is still being held at my house. Last week we started your insanely ridiculous AM/PM schedule, where school is supposedly “five days a week” on campus, but I would argue that point. For some reason, my kids are still in my house with me all morning until lunch time, when you graciously accept them on campus for three full hours in the afternoon.
Congratulations on cramming two whole days of school into a mere five.
This has all been done in the name of public health, and specifically in your case, as you keep pointing out to me, for “the health and safety of our students,” which you tell me nearly every day is your “top priority.”
Your breakfasts lead me to believe that is a huge pile of steaming crap. Allow me to explain.
Since COVID quarantining increases the average appetite by approximately 3000%, you guys decided to give every student in the entire school district free breakfast and lunch every day for the whole school year. I guess COVID also increased your school budget by 3000% as well?
Anyway, my wife and I have a consistent track record in the past of never letting our kids eat the school lunches, because learn how to make your own damn lunch at home, kid. And also, we like our money, and I can feed them for less than the school lunches cost.
That all changed when you went to the totally free plan. We cannot feed them at home for free because we don’t have access to our children’s grandchildren’s future tax revenue like you guys do.
And now, with the amazing new AM/PM zoo you have created, the breakfast/lunch combo meals are “grab ‘n go” style. No one is eating lunch on campus anymore, because that would take up literally 33% of their school day, so if any kid happens to wander near the cafeteria now, they are handed a plastic grocery bag full of food. It is at this point I need to put food in quotes. They are given a bag full of “food.”
Some of it is actual food, although the mystery ingredients in that thing you are calling a BBQ sandwich are highly questionable. It looks like the unholy coupling of a burger patty and a McRib sandwich, being held together with the gel from the top of a can of Spam.
Anyway, it’s your breakfasts that are the real problem, and the reason why I don’t think you have any intertest whatsoever in the “health and safety of our students.”
The first time one of my boys brought home a bag containing “breakfast,” they pulled out a sleeve of white powdered mini donuts. You know, the kind you see at the gas station. The super-healthy donuts were paired with a nice chocolate milk. Powdered donuts and chocolate milk? Are you serious right now?
The next breakfast that came home had Pop-Tarts.
Pop-Tarts!
So, just to recap thus far, you, as a school district, are physically on record as promoting the idea to our children that powdered mini donuts, chocolate milk, and Pop-Tarts are healthy breakfast choices.
I was just shaking my head at that point, but I was willing to look the other way, because I wanted the powdered mini donuts and Pop-Tarts for myself. I lost my cool, however, when a third breakfast came home containing an individual bowl of Froot Loops.
Froot Loops!
They aren’t even made out of actual food. The people that make Froot Loops are so divorced from actual food that they don’t even know how to spell “fruit.”
Have you guys even read the ingredients list on Froot Loops? The very first ingredient is sugar. In case you aren’t aware – and I am assuming, based on the fact that you handed my son Froot Loops, that you are not – the ingredients are required by law to be listed in order of their overall volume in the recipe.
So, since I still feel like I need to explain that to you, what that means is there is more sugar in one Froot Loop than there is anything else. It is a Loop of sugar being held together by some other minor ingredients.
And just a quick scan of the rest of the list tells us that the boys down at the lab are holding all that sugar together with a small amount of wheat and corn flour combined with Red 40, Blue 2, Yellow 6, and Blue 1. Yum!
So, again, you are keeping our children out of school in the name of health and safety, and at the same time handing them Froot Loops. I gotta tell you, the sugars, chemicals, dyes, and preservatives in that crappy excuse for a cereal have got to be far more dangerous to them than COVID ever hoped to be.
I don’t know how long you intend to keep this up, but as long as you’re in a spending mood and keep doing this grab ‘n go free food plan, can we ixnay the sugary breakfast crap, please?
I would really rather you just handed the kids a bag of crushed glass instead. Even the kindergarteners would have enough sense not to put that in their mouths.
Yours in educational excellence through continued partnership,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen
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