The End of An Era

I was quite surprised last evening to see Summit featured on the 6:15 ABC news.  The Superintendent of School was being interviewed about an upcoming policy change and of course, this caught my attention.

I was even more surprised to find out that this discussion was to alert everyone watching that parents in our town could no longer drop into school unannounced for any reason...including bringing a forgotten lunch to their school age children! 

My initial reaction was some concern for the elementary age students coping with this new "no moms to the rescue" policy.  Well, it seems that the age group being the main focus of this new policy is...HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS!  Evidently they forget to bring their lunch on a pretty consistent basis and having moms come out regularly to the school with lunch is a security concern!

However, our Superintendent is proactive and does not want any student to be  hungry while in school.  All students who have forgotten their lunches will be able to eat from their cafeteria and will be issued an IOU for later payment.   This makes me question as to the reliability of those students to remember to bring home the IOU to their parents - what if they forget to do that too?

I started to think back about how our family managed with all of this when our two were in the Summit schools.  What came back to me was: making lunches was the responsibility of those who planned to eat it!  Every year our children were given age appropriate home chores to be done.   Once each child was in second grade, this include making their own lunch...every day! 

I supervised the lunch items being prepared [no cookie sandwiches!] and made sure we had plenty of choices.  Our children had to pack up their lunch and make sure it traveled to school along with their backpack, projects and homework, coats, and whatever else they needed.  And if they wanted to buy a lunch, that was fine too.  There was 'NO LUNCH LEFT BEHIND" in our home and there was never a need for me to drop off a forgotten one!