According to Nypost.com, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s new “Breakfast in the Classroom” program is causing problems for students and teachers.
The idea behind the program is that by allowing students to eat breakfast in the classroom instead of getting up earlier to eat breakfast at school, it should enhance learning opportunities.
But some parents and the PTA state that teachers are spending too much time cleaning up and passing out food.
“[P]arents and teachers say distributing the food and cleaning up takes as much as 30 minutes — a total of 2¹/₂ hours a week.”
One school’s PTA president believes that education is being stolen because of the new rule. The New York Post quotes Vance Gorke, PTA president of Peck Slip public schools as saying that “It’s stealing education from all of our kids.”
The main complaint from parents is that food isn’t healthy and is processed, so it’s not serving the best interest of the kids.
But De Blasio isn’t budging and the United States Department of Education is standing by the program as “many families couldn’t get their kids to school at an earlier time, and that giving free breakfast to everyone would mean poor kids were no longer ‘stigmatized.'”
More than anything, it seems as if the program is so new that teachers haven’t firmly grasped how to manage the program. As one teacher interviewed by the Post put it, “We have not figured out how to manage it.”
Once that bridge is crossed, and maybe a better partnership is formed, the program will be successful. Until then, the PTA and some parents are likely to continue to complain about the breakfast program.
