Two Wisconsin headlines caught my eye today. The first headline was from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank that specializes in analyzing effects of government budget decisions on low- and moderate-income families and individuals. According to the preliminary findings of one of their recent studies, Wisconsin cut state public school aid by $635.00 per student from last year to this, making us number one in dollars cut per student of the 24 states studied. For a classroom of thirty kids, that's over 19,000 dollars. That's a lot of books, a lot of art supplies, a lot of athletic equipment, and a lot of special services that will have to be cut.
The second headline was that the Baraboo (BARE-uh-boo) school district has decided it will no longer offer milk at morning snack time. Officials there are concerned that the state of Wisconsin will eliminate milk subsidies for students from poor families.
Rather than have a two-tier system - milk for the "wealthy" and water for the poor - the district will simply end the milk program.
This is very sad. I don't know how things are in the rest of the nation's schools, but here in the dairy state, the morning school milk break is almost as revered as recess. To be fair, there already was a two-tier system - chocolate milk for the doctor's and lawyer's kids and white milk for almost everyone else - but is this really how low we have sunk? Literally denying children their milk?
From Madison.com:
Many parents pay 30 cents for the daily dairy offering, but state funding through the Wisconsin School Day Milk Program helps pay for the cost of milk for students from poor families, said Molly Fitzgerald, director of elementary programming and principal at Gordon L. Willson Elementary School.
Even with the support from the state program, students who receive free milk through the free and reduced-price lunch program cost the district about $10,400 for free milk with snacks last year. The district instead plans to encourage students to drink water with their morning snacks.
Hats off to the Baraboo district for not covering for Scott Walker, for not hiding the truth about what these drastic cuts mean for working families. Still, it's sad to see a Wisconsin tradition and the cornerstone of our public school nutrition program gutted. It's probably not a good thing for our dairy farmers, either.
Going back to the study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...here are some conclusions they draw based on the deep cuts to public education:
The cuts have extended the recession and slowed the recovery.
The cuts...counteract and sometimes undermine education reform and more generally hinder the ability of school districts to deliver high-quality education, with long-term negative consequences for the nation's economic competitiveness.
Local school districts typically have little ability to replace lost state aid on their own.
Who wants water? Drink up, kids. With the relaxing of our environmental laws, clean water will be hard to get soon.
WED SEP 07, 2011 AT 09:34 AM CDT...Hat tip to greatdarkspot for inspiring this image: