ALTON TO NO LONGER PROVIDE FREE MEALS FOR ALL

  

Beginning in the 2018-19 school year, Alton Elementary School will no longer be considered a Community Eligibility Program campus, and will return to regular participation in the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs.

This means that the campus will no longer provide a free breakfast and lunch daily to all students.

For the past 4 years, Alton has been classified by the Texas Department of Agriculture as a CEP campus, providing a free breakfast and lunch daily to all students.

As a result of the Computerized Selection Process implemented by Brenham ISD in the 2016-2017 school year, the percentage has dropped below the threshold and is expiring for the coming school year at Alton Elementary School.

Any household seeking meal assistance must complete a free and reduced meal application and be approved to receive meal assistance for the 2018-2019 school year.  The application will be available on August 1st, and may be accessed electronically on the BISD Child Nutrition website at http://brenham.healtheliving.net/ or in paper form at the Child Nutrition Office located at 1301 Niebuhr, Brenham.

A special reminder that fourth grade students at Alton Elementary School who are moving to fifth grade will also need to complete an application in order to receive free and reduced meals at Brenham Middle School.

If you have questions regarding this change, please contact the Brenham ISD Child Nutrition Department at 979-277-3750.

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26 Comments

  1. And this boys and girls is the most important lesson in life- there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody is paying for it.

  2. It is a great day to be a Cub…………unless your parents mistakenly forget to add money to your lunch account and you are not on the free or reduced lunch. The schools website says “Brenham Independent School District…A proud community inspiring and encouraging excellence for all.” Sadly that is often not true. This whole lunch thing where irresponsible parents are rewarded and encouraged and kids from homes that believe in responsible parenting are penalized if they make a mistake is crazy. We have this whole thing upside down.

    They need to do something at Krause, I have a third grader who comes home and tells me how out of control some of these kids are. The poor teacher is trying her best and gets almost no help from the front office (I have been up there and seen it). The principal and people in the front office just smile and nod as the kids are running crazy and the teachers are trying their best to keep control. There is one little boy who says the most inappropriate things to the little girls and the principals do nothing about it. I have friends who teach there and they all say how bad it has become over the last few years. I don’t understand why the administration will not get them some help, it is chaos a lot of the time.

    1. When my daughter was at Krause, we had the same experience. I had meeting after meeting with the principal and the teacher. Nothing would be done to stop the little boy. He took his pants off and put them on my daughter’s head and they told me “at least he had underwear on.” He stabbed her with a pencil and they told me he was sorry. He would swear constantly and make suggestive remarks all the time and they told me that they didn’t hear it. More things happened but I will end with the highlights. When a child’s misbehavior isn’t corrected early on, it only gets worse. It is truly a disgrace to our beautiful town and school district. My hope is that the school district recognizes these issues and makes changes now to protect our kids before someone gets seriously hurt.

  3. You shouldn’t have kids if you can’t afford to take care of them and feed them, some people are always looking for free handouts, my OLD MAN told me if I ever got in a bind “ SIR A MAN GOTTA DO WHAT A MAN GOTTA DO”

    1. You, sir, have a mean heart! There are some families where both parents are working multiple jobs to make ends meet and still have a hard time providing for their families. You don’t know their situation. Be kind and understanding as one day something beyond your control might happen and you might find yourself struggling to feed your family.

      1. We need more KIND folks like Gary that have a big heart and care about the needs of children as a parent.
        We need less UNKIND folks that call people like Gary “mean” because they don’t like being told that moral absolutes really do matter. Or as much as they wish it to be true, the myriad of social programs they have endorsed have the opposite effect of what they were sold as and so have a dire need to divert blame from themselves.

        “You don’t know their situation”. That’s incorrect, the situation is almost always known.
        SS, Disability, SNAP, WIC, Unemployment Comp, HUD, School Buses and public trans, job placement, Faith Mission (our very own cutting edge charity), Higgins Branch (which has great clothes), and that’s just off the top of my head. Even with all that – a PB&J, banana, apple, chips, and milk/water are out of reach for the parent(s) and school meals are required. Right.

        1. As an employee of the state for over 10 years now, plus an employee of a part time job, it is not always easy to make ends meet. Yes I am a single mother, yes it was by choice, but that does not mean that my child needs to not be fed. I show up, I do my job and I am still not compensated as all the others in my office were. Had I been, my child would now be off of Medicaid and on my insurance. Since people decide to give raises to their buddies and their friends, and not the people who actually work hard and do a good job, my child suffers and YOU as tax payers pay the price. I work as hard or harder than most people and I am good at my job. So do not judge someone because their child is on welfare or Medicaid until you have the whole story. Not all on state assistance are lazy and jobless, some chose to work for the STATE OF TEXAS and do not get paid a fair wage for the work they do!! Perhaps you should ask your lawmakers why so many state employees are on govt. assistance!!!

      2. Well then!! If the family is in that bad of shape I suppose they are getting an EBT card. So the parents can buy lunchmeat and bread,make a sandwich and send on to school. Should not have to worry about lunch. And if not. A cheese sandwich is ok if your hungry.

  4. The La Grange, Tx ISD announced last month that ALL students will get FREE meals for the 2018-2019 school year.

  5. The Free and Reduced Lunch Program had such great intentions, but it has become abused by so many. There are kids who are getting free lunches and their parents make above the requirement, and nobody bothers to actually check. They fill out the form and it is granted without any verification. I see so many of these kids in school with nice things, their parents driving cars the teachers can’t afford, and money being wasted on unneeded things, while I watch these kids get their free lunches everyday. Heaven help us if a kids who is not on free lunches forgets their money, they get treated worse than a prison inmate, but others get all the free stuff they want. It is sad to see taxpayers being abused by those who are not honest,

  6. That stinks! Because there are families that sometimes can’t even afford the reduced lunch price. And that child may go without breakfast and/or lunch while their friends are eating. If criminals can get 3 square meals a day FREE(on taxpayer money), then our children in the school system should too.

    1. It’s not the schools responsibility to make sure my kid or yours gets a free breakfast or lunch. Be a responsible adult and make sure your child eats breakfast at home before they go to school. Same thing with lunch. Make them a sandwich, put it in a paper sack and send it with them. It’s not that hard.

    2. Not a Happy Camper:

      Read the story. Children can still get the free meals if the parents fill out the application and are approved.

    3. No child in our district, at least in the elementary schools, miss breakfast or lunch for not being able to pay. If the student doesn’t qualify for free/reduced lunch and forgets money, the student will still get breakfast and lunch. If the student gets food without paying for it for a few days, said student will usually get a less desirable meal of a cheese sandwich or something along those lines. Im sure it’s harder to make sure every student eats at the middle/junior/high school level. But I do know for a fact, no elementary student in our district misses lunch.

      1. Doesn’t that reward parental neglect?
        So feed the child, but don’t let the parent(s) off the hook. Once or twice is a mistake but three times is more of a habit that needs to be broken. CPS is a good place to start and the parents need to know it when you call them.

        Lots of folks will make the argument that if you report the parents they will just not bring their children to school and the problem will be made worse. That’s complete nonsense, the root cause has to be corrected or our society will continue to degrade.

        1. The root causes cannot be corrected. Not all people are equally intelligent. Not all people have ‘good’ judgment. Not all people always make ‘good’ decisions. Until science finds a way to correct this in vivo, we can either accept these facts, or you can try to eliminate them. That elimination has a name: eugenics. Now, you have repeatedly questioned the necessity of any government aid to any citizens, but particularly the poor and uneducated, and you rather aggressively question the motivations of commenters who debate your attacks on social programs. So I ask you, in light of the facts, what would you have us do? Eugenics? Forced sterilization? Formal class-privilege? Forced labor? Slavery?

          1. Well, it appears that your facts are not facts, at least as they pertain to the issue we’re talking about. The solution is about how to nurture, NOT nature, eugenics or planned parenthood. It doesn’t matter how intelligent a population is as long as you have and promote the right culture for them. Please read “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture” by Amy Wax and Larry Alexander. If you do a search, it will pop up along with the comments of a couple thousand crying leftists. They lay out the problem and solution better than any that I’ve seen.

          2. I have read it, and the authors, despite having the education to know better, make no effort to actually make an argument. I’ll summarize the treatise (it’s not really a book, it’s just a lengthy essay) for other KWHI readers who aren’t familiar with it; Wax and Alexander reiterate the familiar argument that the current problems we face in American society are the result of abandoning the “old precepts;” i.e., faith, marriage before children, no birth control, oppression of minorities, etc. They also make some rather odd and vague claims that post-war prosperity is to blame (we blaming leftists for the prosperity, too, or we gonna give the conservatives credit for the prosperity while blaming leftists for misusing it? Oh wait, I can guess…), and that “cultural leaders” abandoned their responsibilities for an unspecified “variety of reasons.” No word on whether those leaders were leftists or not but I’m sure we can all guess.

            Their proposed solution to resolving all current issues is for culture to change (presumably all at once and immediately) back to the way it was in the good ol’ days. That’s it, that’s their whole solution. You, Christopher, have repeatedly tried to make the same point, and repeatedly I have tried to illustrate to you that this ludicrous plan has no relevance to people who are alive and dumb and making bad decisions RIGHT NOW. It is TOO LATE to influence their long ago childhoods so that they grow into responsible adults. And when they grow up to become ignorant and irresponsible adults, as so many people have, you seriously think they’re going to just spontaneously decide to start watching John Wayne movies to glean life-lessons and become church-goers to repent their ‘sinful ways?’ You’re delusional.

          3. The Bourgeois values covered in the referenced op-ed actually read:
            Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake, get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, avoid idleness, go the extra mile for your employer or client, be a patriot ready to serve the country, be neighborly, be civic-minded, be charitable, avoid coarse language in public, be respectful of authority, avoid substance abuse, avoid crime.
            For comparisons sake, a program called Core Essentials (CE) is popular in schools these days. The 12 CE values are respect, friendship, creativity, gratitude, generosity, commitment, kindness, peace, honesty. This is a start, but even defined, the values are nondescript and open to interpretation/relativism.
            The author, Amy Wax is a part of the Jewish minority in this country so it’s interesting that one of the values that “Abandon…” fabricated for the referenced article is “oppression of minorities” . For the audience, she’s also literally a brain surgeon, lawyer, and professor. And she , like many others, has come to the conclusion that the only way to end the perpetual degradation of our behavior in this country is to bring back our old values. Assimilation is not oppression. It’s a requirement for a nation-state to remain solvent.
            It took 50 years of progressive policy starting with the “Great Society” programs to get us to here, to break the family unit and start producing intergenerational delinquents. Our “open minded” attitudes of “it’s all good”, “don’t judge” are as absurd as the idea of a relative multi-culture within which they are imbedded. We are living in a time where people look at you sideways for saying we are man and woman; how insane can you get. It will take at least as long to get it back to good health, or however long America chooses to entertain these notions of government as daddy.

            Our educational institutions, progressive government and legal systems, media, and entertainment have to be rewired to promote those values, just as they were corrupted over the last 50 years to promote delinquency and mental illness. One thing the progressive left has proven is that behavior and social norms can be shaped on large scale. They reshaped a good portion of American behavior, it’ll just have to be undone and shaped back.

          4. You’re still missing the point, and deliberately, I feel. I don’t intentionally feed trolls.

          5. That’s the second direct ad hominem.
            You can shape adult behavior just as you can a childs. Much harder to make it permanent, but with policy in place it can be. The programs we have now do not even attempt to shape it in the right direction, the Bourgeois values. If I get more specific, I would be into making policy examples.

      2. Respectfully, that was not my daughter’s experience. We do not need others to pay for our child’s meal and happily pay for it ourselves. I do recall a time when we added the payment online and hit a button wrong and the payment did not apply to her account as we thought it did. As a result, her lunch account had an insufficient balance to cover the cost of the lunch. The folks at Krause Elementary in the presence of the principal took the hot lunch out of her hands and threw it away to give her a cheese sandwich. She was embarrassed and humiliated (not to mention hungry). She had never failed to pay for her meals, but the kids whose parents do not behave responsibility got to eat their free meal while she was given a tiny bad tasting sandwich. It was OK for her to be hungry while others ate our (taxpayer) expense. A simple phone call would have immediately taken care of the problem but we were not even given that courtesy.

        1. Totally unacceptable on that campus food service; in fact that is a form of Child abuse. Wasting a hot meal for a substitute sandwich is incomprehensible.

          1. The poster that wrote about his/her daughter above is not an exception. I work at our elementary schools and have seen it happen, and yes the Krause principal and head folks in the cafeteria are well aware it happens. They will actually take a hot lunch away and throw it away and give a child a cheese sandwich. It is terrible! The kids walk away crying and often are not given a chance to even call their parents. The advocate is right, it is incomprehensible, but a lot of things on those campuses are.

          2. I agree wasting a hot meal for a sandwich is incomprehensible, not to mention if reported enough the school can lose funding for the meals, which causes costs to go up, etc. (Personally I think $2.50 is already high for some of the meals I’ve seen given at schools – I don’t expect the trays to be overflowing, but many are rather barren for active kids).

            Mind you this happened in the early ’90s when I was in Junior High, but when there was a clerical error and I had supposedly been “eating free” for a week, the cafeteria lady let me know and we just had to pay for the meals that were accidentally given to me on top of naturally prepaying the next couple of weeks.

            They didn’t throw meals away because it was wasteful (let alone their fault not informing us).

            As this is apparently happening in schools here, they really do need to pay attention to those details and – if there is a case where a meal is supposedly given in error, they either a. call the parents to see if it’s been paid up, but definitely b. – let the kid eat the meal given to them and have the parent just pay for the missed meal payment. If they refuse that, then one day the student has to eat a cheese sandwich in compensation for the erroneous day.

            That’s fair, it isn’t wasteful and it doesn’t long term have an impact on the lunch funding.

            Another suggestion – though a bit more expensive – have them buy lunch meal ticket books and when they’re empty, they have to buy another set. There is of course possible issues of them being lost/etc. (unless they’re given to the teacher and put in their folders/desk, but you can easily track the tickets better if you’re nearly out).

        2. OMG, Not My Experience, you are so right! I have heard about that from my son. He comes home and tells me the things that go on at that campus and I am shocked. The inmates are running the asylum there.

          Go check out the teachers, they look shell shocked at this time of the year. I have a friend who teaches in the lower grades there and she is looking for another job, she has been a teacher for a long time and can’t wait to get out. The leadership is terrible.

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