My Personal Outrage: The Welfare State Hits Home

I'm not going to name names or places. There's no point.

My two sons attend public school. After doing some research, I found that 80% of the students attending their school receive free lunches, paid for by taxpayer money. My children are not among the freeloaders. You will agree, that is an incredibly high number. But, what makes this number even more amazing, is that I live in a town that consistently ranks among the highest in the nation in terms of "most educated cities" (as measured by the number of college degrees per permanent residents). So, it's not as if I live amongst perfunctory retards. But that number is not the source of my outrage, but it is related.

As a bit of background, school lunches are paid for at my children's school with a "lunch card". The "lunch card" is the creation of some well-meaning liberal who thought it would be a great idea, as part of the cradle to grave nanny-state ideology, to stop the milk-money shakedown that all of us had to avoid growing up. However, as mentioned above, the taxpayer is now the one being shaken down. How it works is that those parents who actually pay for their children's lunch send a check to the school which then, in turn, credits the child's card and the child presents it to the cashier as payment. Much like a credit card.

Last week my children's school was participating in the State's standardized testing, an extremely important time in a student's measurement. The school prepares the children for months so as to maximize their test results. The individual child's results are significant in that they determine any special placement that may be appropriate for the child. For my children, obviously, what was at stake was an escape from the medicore mindless offspring of the 80% of non-lunch paying parents. A big deal.

So there my children are, right in the middle of the first (of two) day of testing. It's lunchtime. My children present their "lunch card" to the mole-faced cashier. She tells them there is no money on the card and they are not allowed to eat lunch. They are literally denied lunch. This occurred on both days of testing. My children are forced to go the whole day of testing without anything to eat for lunch. The school does not call me and my children, troopers that they are, never mentioned this to me or their mother. Two days later I get a call from the school explaining to me the situation and asking me to fund my children's "lunch card". My response? "I funded the card. It's paid until the end of the school year". The school then does some investigating and finds out that indeed my children's "lunch card" is funded for the end of the school year. The school then explains to me that they have hired a new cashier and that she is having some difficulty entering the data from lunch cards that are actually funded with real money, vs. those cards that are presented by the children of the freeloaders who receive free lunches. Which says to me, that my children were not the only cash paying students who were denied the lunch they had already paid for.

You can imagine my outrage. My children are denied lunch and undoubtedly embarrassed in front of their friends. On the most important testing days of the year. This despite the fact that I am among the few who actually pay for their children's lunches.

I work for a living. So my opportunity to pay a visit to the school and unleash my anger is limited. Rest assured, however, that I have every intention of making my voice heard. Just as I'm doing here. I intend to make these people very uncomfortable.