Author’s Note: This piece was a satire summative assessment. Since elementary school, every year I have grown less and less impressed with the school lunch program, maybe even annoyed. This piece was written for anyone who thinks school lunch programs in general, are not very good. My purpose is to help encourage the audience to generate new ideas that could be implemented by letting them know something needs to be done, and that something is probably not the idea I am proposing.
It has been brought to my attention from personal experience and my peers’ experiences that although it claims to be high and mighty, our school lunch program is clearly not the best. In fact, many school lunch programs around the nation are not reaching their full potential. They never will. Unless something is done about it.
For many years, I have complained about many terrible aspects of *city*’s school lunch program, and have witnessed horrible spectacles such as large bins filled with fruit, but only one fruit, and even worse, blue trays lined up on the counters, filled with food that will be thrown away. I have come up with many solutions on my own, but unfortunately, since I am just a “thoughtless student”, I was never given the chance to present those ideas. One such idea was to buy an assortment of fruits and vegetables so that every day each week there would be at least three fruits and three vegetables for students to choose from, and another idea was to invest in higher quality food so more students would be willing to try the meal, realize they like it, and continue to buy it, therefore allowing the school to gain a larger profit. Obviously, these ideas would take too much effort to implement, so I am proposing something much more simple: something that would take a lot less effort.
The school should simply get rid of the school lunch program. The 838 students who attend *a* High School would be better off if they just brought a lunch from home every day. Even if only half of the school gets school lunch each day, that’s over 400 students for the lunch staff to serve. The school would no longer have to pay for food. Although this would mean the school would no longer have a profit from the lunches served, there will be no need for lunch staff, and therefore there would be less people the school would have to pay. In fact, dropping the lunch program and the staff would most likely save the school money in the end.
With no school lunch, there will be no need for siblings to share school lunch accounts. Students won’t need to starve in June if a sibling uses the last of the lunch money in a joint account. There will be no more trays lined up on the walls, ready to be thrown away. No more food will be wasted, so the school won’t contribute as much garbage into the ever growing landfills of America. The average high school student produces around 50 pounds of garbage just at school, and the average elementary school student produces around 100 pounds of garbage. That means *a* High School is throwing away roughly 41,900 pounds per year (not even including the teachers). If the school lunch program was abolished, that number would greatly decrease. Even though students would still have garbage from packed lunches, they are more likely to eat the specially packed lunch instead of the questionable substances served by the school, therefore reducing the amount of food thrown away.
Some parents may argue that the only meal some children get all day is lunch. Although this doesn’t tend to happen in *this city*, it certainly does in other parts of the world where this proposal may be implemented. The school lunches are so overpriced that it would actually be cheaper to go to the store and buy food for children instead of paying for the school lunch. In *this city*, school lunches are either $2.40 or $3.75, but the school purposely makes all of the lesser enjoyed lunches $2.40 and the lunches students are more likely to enjoy $3.75. That is a lot of money for the quality and quantity of the food served. A family of four can have a full dinner for less than $5, and that is after the grocery stores raise the prices to make a profit. That means in theory, lunches should be less than $1.25+ a profit margin. Even if the school wants to get twice what they paid for, the school lunches should cost $2.50 at most, not $3.75. Thus, buying food at grocery stores is much cheaper.
The advantages of my proposal obviously outweigh any possible disadvantages that opposers might bring up. First, the school would no longer have to pay for food, and would save money by getting rid of the lunch staff. Second, it would eliminate the amount of garbage the school produces. Third, it would be cheaper for parents and students to buy food from the grocery store anyway. My proposal would benefit both the students and the *a* School District, and should therefore be taken very seriously.
