Strange concern

The girl Snezhana is 12 years old. To the question: “Why don’t you go to the dining room?” He answers that he doesn’t want to eat at all. And the mother drinks and has no regular income. Snezhana will never complain about her, because she loves her unlucky mother very much. But there is no money in the family to pay 500 rubles a month for school lunches. And Snezhana stands in front of the dining room door, waiting for her classmates, who bring her pieces of bread, and she, clumsily hiding, eats them greedily.

Ten-year-old Kuzma is no longer allowed into the school cafeteria - his parents did not repay the resulting debt on time, the family has many children, receives some compensation from social services, but can barely make ends meet. When Kuzma realizes that his parents are unable to pay for school lunches, he, too, “won’t want to eat.”

All rural schoolchildren in grades 1 and 2 in the Kirov region receive free breakfasts worth 20 rubles (for the second academic year). The governor’s plans were to provide free breakfasts to all primary school students in rural areas since 2013, but this is a costly endeavor, is not being implemented so quickly and now requires the attraction of municipal funds. At first glance, everything is great, taking care of children.

But today, deputies of the Slobodskaya District Duma unanimously voted to abolish preferential meals for the last categories of children who previously received it - wards and children from low-income families who attended after-school groups. After a preliminary analysis, they rejected proposals to introduce benefits for children both from low-income families and from low-income large families - the task turned out to be too heavy for the municipal budget. There are too many of them. And what happened - it will go to first and second graders.

It turns out that the state in our region subsidizes families with first and second graders, regardless of their income level. I believe that for a significant number of these families it would not be difficult to pay for a child’s breakfast - 3,500 rubles a year. If he needs them, these school breakfasts, as the company of benefactors led by Onishchenko wrote into the sanitary standards. For the budget, organizing such meals in an elementary school, where there are at least 10 children in each class, already costs 140 thousand rubles a year.

So why not give this money to those most in need? After all, all children want to eat at ten, twelve, and fifteen years old. Including those who went to school before the government made anyone happy with its program. Why not feed Snezhana and Kuzma?