Secretary of Education has no education on what is needed for our nation’s children
February 28, 2017
In the U.S. alone, around 13 million children struggle with the battle of hunger. Every day the meal that students get at school is sometimes the only one they eat. In 1946, president Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act which established the National School Lunch Program. This program provides reduced-price or free lunches to children of low income families. According to The National Center for Education Statistics, the amount of students in public schools that are living in poverty jumped from 17 percent to 20 percent between the years 2000 and 2013. Education professionals around the country are searching for answers to these problems. But what Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos said at the Conservative Political Action Conference has some people shocked.
“I’m Betsy DeVos. You may have heard some of the ‘wonderful’ things the mainstream media has called me lately,” said DeVos. “I, however, pride myself on being called a mother, a grandmother, a life partner and perhaps the first person to tell Bernie Sanders to his face that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
This statement may have been meant as a joke, however to many parents and educators this is no laughing matter. To those millions of children who DeVos claims to serve as Secretary of Education, there is such thing as free lunch they depend on it.
According to KELOLAND news, in 2014, 50 percent of the students in the Sioux Falls School District were being helped by federal free and reduced price lunches. That is more students than ever before who need help just getting a meal during the day in our community alone.
In 2012, more than 31 million children received free or reduced lunches, yet DeVos says that free lunch is not a thing. This is not the first time that DeVos has criticism for the things she has said. She has even gone to the extremes by trying to support the funneling of taxpayer dollars towards private schools and lacks basic knowledge of the education policy concepts of this nation. As a woman who has inherited billions of dollars by doing nothing but simply being born, she has no room to say “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
#Feedthekids
Anonymous • Mar 1, 2017 at 6:32 pm
While I agree with the article that free and reduced lunches are important and beneficial I feel that the jab at Betsy DeVos was unnecessary and her quote was misunderstood. Her quote “…there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” is not saying that they don’t exist or that they are not needed. What it is saying is that somebody, somewhere else is paying for those lunches. I did not come with out evidence, according to
https://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/NSLPFactSheet.pdf
the National School Lunch Act is a federally funded project and cost a whopping $11.6 billion dollars in 2012. This money is not magically created out of thin air and the numbers do in fact back up DeVos’ assertion that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I enjoy the Statesman and reading it (I love the online version!) but I struggle with the political editorials. It seems that an overwhelming majority of them are of left wing views and although some of them make reasonable claims they often times contain weak evidence, poor writing, and seem to mainly slander and bash republicans. I realize they are editorials and the writers are free to write what they would like but I feel like the views of the student body are not accurately represented in this category.