There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch (Now In Massachusetts Schools!)

Hooray for universal school lunch!

Like the school cafeteria isn’t enough of a minefield to begin with. Credit: Mean Girls (2004)

Massachusetts has become the eighth state — after California, Maine, Colorado Connecticut, Vermont, Minnesota and New Mexico — to offer universal free school lunch to students in grades K-12. Hooray!

Families are expected to save $1,200 per kid, per year, which is a whole lot of money for a lot of people.

---

---

As much as some people might say, “Well, why not just have it be for the kids who can’t afford lunch and let the kids whose parents can afford it pay their own way” there are a lot of reasons why that doesn’t work so well. For one, the mere fact of people knowing who is and is not paying for their own lunch can be humiliating for kids. For another, there are kids whose parents can afford it, but who may just forget or even lose it. For another another, kids having money on them for lunch at school can unfortunately lead to the classic “give me your lunch money” bullying scenarios.

---

---

Anything that makes class distinctions less obvious in schools is worth whatever it costs.

Gov. Maura Healey acknowledged this, explaining that part of the reason for implementing the program is that “free lunch” won’t have a stigma if everyone has “free lunch.”

“An investment in childhood nutrition that’s also removing a source of stress from our schools and homes,” she said.

I will say it till I die — the best, most popular policies are always going to be things that take things off people’s minds so they don’t have to think about them or worry about them. Even well-off people are happy to scratch something off that list.

---

---

And hey! It also means that it ensures that kids are going to be getting something nutritious to eat at lunch (instead of, say, skipping lunch and spending their lunch money on coffee and cigarettes, which is what some people used to do), and will therefore be better able to concentrate in class afterwards.

The universal free school lunch program implemented across the country was hugely popular and 74 percent of Americans believed it should continue (including 63 percent of Republicans), so hopefully we will see this happening in more states.