back when i was a boy growing up in slidell, a hot lunch cost 16 cents (now this is well over 30 years ago). 3 out of 5 school days we would get red (or white) beans and rice (sometimes with meat) plus a wedge of cornbread (usually dry), a piece of spice cake for desert, and a carton of milk to wash down the cornbread. when they upped the price to a quarter, there was almost a riot. what are they charging now and what do they serve. do the kids get a choice for their meal (back then the answer was no).
Last year I saw in the Advocate where they published the menus at all the public schools. I don't remember the cost but they had a lot more choices than we did. They can even order pizza or hamburgers.
My kid's school has a cool menu if you decide to not bring your own food. Mondays = Chick Fil A Sandwich Tuesdays = Cici's Pizza Wednesday = Arby's Roastbeef Sandwich I don't know about the other days.
At St. Joseph's, lunch is about $1.60. We have your typical cafeteria lunches, pizza, spaghetti, hamburgers and the always-popular chicken varieties. Pretty standard, it's pretty good, most people eat it.
At the middle school where I teach, lunch ranges from $2-$4 dollars because many items are ala carte. They can choose from burgers, fries, pizza (Dominoes), nachos, standard cafeteria hot lunches, salads (no one but teachers eat those), etc. The problem is not only the cost. I mean, if you have two or three children, you're spending up to $240 a month on SCHOOL lunch, but a lot of kids are fat and out of shape. If you don't believe me, then you don't know how many pudgy kids lope around in the halls. I've had students with Type 2 diabetes (used to just be older people) and a number of them with cholesterol so high that they have to be medicated. I personally don't believe kids need to have fast food choices at school. They get enough of that outside of school. When I was in school in the 70's and 80's, lunch was 80 cents a day (by '88, when I graduated.) French fries, for instance, were baked and most people didn't finish their servings, but then again, we weren't type 2 diabetic or on cholesterol medication, either.
When I was in high school we had "special" lunch one friday out of the month. That would consist of the cafeteria staff cooking the silver dollar sized hamburgers and the school importing french fries from Checkers. When I was in middle school, if you forgot your lunch they'd send you to the kitchen to get a peanut butter sandwich.
