I have watched helplessly the slow and painful terminal illness of public education over more than 40 years in community journalism
It feels like watching a loved one slowly deteriorate from emphysema after smoking too many cigarettes for too long. It feels like the fable about the frog who was coaxed into bathing in warm water in a pot while the temperature was carefully increased until the amphibian boiled to death.
This feeling returned this week when I learned Wayland Union Schools is considering termination of providing hot lunches to children at St. Therese School. The reason this is being discussed is the reason why everything bad happens — money.
St. Therese indeed is a parochial school, but unlike other neighboring religious institutions, it does not regard public schools with disdain and its students as heathens. A huge majority of St. Therese children wind as students Wayland once they get beyond sixth grade.
So it is plausible to view St. Therese in a similar way we might view Dorr Elementary, housing future students for Wayland Union Schools.
Yet St. Therese is by no means affluent. The parents pay their taxes to public schools and they pay tuition to St. Therese as well. It struggles to be able to provide a hot lunch program for the kids, and has been counting on the expertise and support from Wayland’s food service program to provide this essential service.
Now comes the notion that St. Therese’s hot lunch program is not financially self-supporting, so perhaps it should be eliminated.
This is strange in the wake of a first-class public relations program over the summer in which WUS provided breakfasts and lunches for everybody in the community under age 18 Monday through Friday.
To be sure, many local churches and the Dorr and Wayland libraries also got on board with the program, which deserves praise. But it appeared the biggest financial costs of the summer program were absorbed by Wayland Union Schools and a grant.
This very same public school system now may turn its back on a local parochial school.
One huge reason is the emphysema that has been choking public education for a long time — privatization. I always thought public schools were not in business to make money, rather to provide an essential service in our society.
But over the past three decades, there has been a deliberate and cynical attempt by business and government to turn schools into businesses, and superintendents and their minions look more today like corporate CEOs and their henchmen. Some may believe that public schools indeed should be run like businesses, but I see a huge difference between children and widgets.
In these modern a-go-go times we’re viewing our children as though they’re budding consumers rather than future people we hope can solve problems we have created.
Public schools in Michigan over the years have become more autocratic, more like prisons, more like corporations churning out products, not bastions of learning and centers of critical thinking. Many schools have privatized custodians, food service workers, aides, bus drivers, and teachers will be next. We’re finally hearing about growing teacher shortages and I hear tell substitute teachers who work for corporations are too few and far between.
Some will blame these developments on greedy teachers who broke the bank years ago and on apathetic parents. Some point the finger at a permissive society and “not allowing God into the classroom,” which seems weird when talking about an omnipotent being who is supposed to be everywhere.
I blame basing the value of everything on money. Which is exactly what WUS is doing to the St. Therese lunch program.
Find a solution. Don’t take away the kids’ lunches, just because you can.
