You can go ahead and call me crazy if you want, but I’m adamant in my belief that Catholic kids have the same right to eat as their non-Catholic counterparts.
And, of course, who’s going to argue with that?
Times are tough all over, as the saying goes, and when times are tough, it’s often children that bear the brunt of it. And sadly, they often pay the price for tough times by going hungry more often than they should.
It’s easy to say that no child should ever go hungry, ever, but the sad truth of it is that it happens all the time. Derelect adults, neglectful parents, down and out care-givers more concerned with their next fix or hit, all of this kind of stuff happens in the world, and you’d have to be wilfully blind to think that it does’t happen right here in Renfrew.
Right under our noses.
When you see line-ups at the Food Bank that look like Apple Stores when a new iPhone is released, then you know society is creaking under the weight of horrible decisions made by adults and politicians. It doesn’t take much to put a kid on the street, hungry. All it takes is some billionaire to figure out a way to squeeze even more life out of the lower classes to pad his/her wealth, and there you go. It’s entirely axiomatic (that means obvious) that rich people are the worst thing to ever happen to poor people, and it’s been that way forever.
Some people want more, more , and more. And they’re more than willing to see other people get less, less, and less.
When you send your kid to school tired and hungry, you’re adding to the laundry list of reasons why that child is going to have a tough life. Because all of us are products of our life experiences, that whole nature/nurture thing can come around full-circle and help develop a child who learns how to tolerate poor and neglectful treatment. It can assist in the development of an angry and bitter child/adolescent/teen/adult. And it will definitely put them at a disadvantage when it comes to school, education, and their prospects for whatever follows school.
You can’t do much of anything when you’re tired and hungry, and that’s even more obvious with children, especially poor or neglected children, who must endure that neglect or abuse at home and then be chased out the door in the morning so that they can go to school with no lunch, and be ridiculed by other kids while there. Because kids can be cruel when they’re allowed to be.
Food is a basic right. The failure to provide it to a child is a crime. But it’s one of those crimes that goes unnoticed or uninterrupted by community adults and kids more concerned with what’s going on in their own, well-fed lives.
At school, we’re all supposed to be equal, but we’re not. A terrible thing to say, sure, but there it is. I was a teacher for 32 years, so I have some sense of the way things are, the way things work, and too often the way things don’t work.
To their credit, schools will mount breakfast programs or nutrition/snack programs, and God bless all the folks who put in the time and effort to tend to the needs of some of their less fortunate charges. But sadly, breakfast programs come and go, mostly because of funding irregularity, the surge of food-related allergies, or the fact that the teacher running the program is eating all the toast and Cheese-Whiz. Don’t scoff, I’ve seen it.
Another thing I’ve seen, incredibly often, is kids from well-to-do families showing up and scarfing down breakfast because it was way more convenient for them, and plus, in the winter, they don’t have to remain outside on the schoolyard waiting for the bell. They can come in to the warmth of the building and chow down. And these types of kids are often socially intimidating to the kids who actually need these programs. And who in their right mind is going to challenge some kid’s right to be there and face the wrath of irate parents? Not exactly a ringing-endorsement of those well-to-do parents who don’t notice their own kids heading off to school without a breakfast of their own. Or worse, parents who are absolutely okay with their own kids sticking it to other kids with their self-centred indifference.
President’s Choice, the grocery folks, are doing something about it with their Children’s Charity Program, whereby donations are received and translated into food and nutritional education for local schools, including those right here in Renfrew.
That is the public schools, not the Catholic ones.
That’s not on President’s Choice, or No Frills, or Galen Weston, or Per Bank. It’s on the Catholic schools themselves.
I was doing some grocery shopping and came across a donor tree at my local No Frills, so I checked it out. It was connected to the Children’s Charity effort to feed hungry kids at school so that they’d have half-a-chance to participate effectively in school life and education. Absolutely top-shelf stuff, so I started to consider how many of my millions I was going to donate so that I could get a recognition apple placed on the tree so that everybody could look and see what an outstanding human being I am.
It was then that I noticed that there were two schools listed as beneficiaries of the program here locally, Central Public School and Queen Elizabeth Public School. Missing was St. Thomas the Apostle and Our Lady of Fatima, the two local Catholic elementary schools.
Which made me wonder why those two schools would not be part of a program like this.
Were they not invited? Is this just another example of the great historical schism between Catholics and non-Catholics? Do the President’s Choice people assume that Catholic kids are well-fed because they’re, well, Catholic? Are the No-Frillers pissed that Catholic schools get funding equal to their public counterparts? Or is it simply a case of Catholic administrators asleep at the switch? Maybe there’s some policy rationale that lay behind their exclusion?
I went online to get some more details about the program and to determine what the expectations and conditions might be for a school to register with, and become part of, the program. On the site, there were listings of participating schools from across the country, including Ontario. I scrolled through the list and found countless Catholic schools listed among the participants, all over the province.
Except for here in Renfrew County, where there were none.
And it made me wonder why Catholic schools near and far are taking advantage of this corporate outreach fundraising, yet our good friends over at the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board were noticeably absent.
Are Catholic kids here different in some way from Catholic kids, or any kids for that matter, elsewhere? Do we not see this problem within our own school board’s boundaries? Or do we just have matters in hand, under control, and don’t need any help from any outside sources because we’ve got our collective act together so much more than public school board administrators?
I’m absolutely sure that there’s a perfectly good and reasonable explanation for the RCCDSB schools to not be involved in this program. It may be because they have existing programs that are robust and effective. It may be that they’ve done their own fundraising, or that some deep-pocketed individuals have donated the funds necessary to operate their own programs.
Maybe there’s some in-house policy that’s getting in the way and preventing them from jumping aboard.
And then again, maybe there is no policy. Maybe there is no acceptable rationale. Maybe they were just caught flat-footed, although how that could possibly happen is hard to accept, given how many other schools are involved. But schools, and the people who run them, are not academies of perfect decision-making in every case.
One thing I’m certain of.
I’m not going to be the only guy to notice this discrepancy. Nor will I be the only Catholic. And I know that Catholic parents of school-aged children, and others, will take note and wonder why their schools aren’t represented.
As I said, there may be a perfectly good reason. And so, that said, they should articulate it so that the poor folks working at No Frills don’t have to be on the front-line for these types of questions from curious Catholics out doing their grocery shopping.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 