No one is against serving healthful lunches in the cafeterias of our nation’s schools. But new federal rules requiring improvements in the nutritional value of school lunches have created cost headaches for school districts.
The problem is, the fruits, vegetables and other foods that are emphasized in the recent regulations are much more expensive than the foods that they are replacing.
And although Washington is giving schools some initial funding to make the transition, the rules amount to “an unfunded mandate of hundreds of millions of dollars that goes into perpetuity,” a spokeswoman for Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell told the online news service Stateline.
By the beginning of the 2012-13 academic year, the more healthful lunches are supposed to be provided. But the money that the federal government is providing to help pay for the more wholesome but costlier meals isn’t nearly enough to cover the long-term expense.
“Those funds are short term and will likely be inadequate to fully cover state costs,” governors from around the country noted in a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
What makes the excessive regulations even more troubling is that most states are already strapped for cash in the current economic crisis, so school funding is even lower than it might otherwise be. That makes it doubly hard to fulfill the federal school lunch mandate.
Don’t these difficulties suggest once again that far-away Washington is not the place where decisions about local education — including school lunch menus — should be made?
Wouldn’t we be well advised to return to the wisdom of the Constitution, which leaves matters such as education to the states and the people?