It’s 7:00 P.M. on a cold February night, volunteers at a local Detroit, Michigan elementary school are gathering at their local community center to form a committee dedicated to creating “snack packs” to hand out to the city’s students who rely on after school programs as one of the only places they get to eat each day. The packs include sandwiches, fruit, and protein filled snacks that will help the child to feel full until they get to eat again, almost a full day later at school lunch. The recipient children are current members of after school programs that provide child care, educational help, and meals to underprivileged children in the metropolitan area. The volunteers are all concerned about after school program funding cuts, and they …show more content…
You may be wondering why you haven’t heard of the massive childhood hunger issue in America; maybe it is too taboo, maybe we assume that schools and the government are taking care of the issue, or maybe we as a society have turned a blind eye to the topic because it is not significant in our day to day lives. Although childhood hunger may not affect you directly, with over 31 million kids relying on free or reduced price lunches in the United States, the odds are great that you went to school with, or have met a child who depends on federally funded food sources during and after school as their main source of nutrition for the majority of their childhood. As part of the current White House administration’s budget, cuts would be made to after school programs. Their claim is that there is no irrefutable proof for the claim that feeding kids after school leads to increased performance in the classroom. In theory, the programs were created as a way to enhance academic performance amongst school children with the idea that providing them with nutritious food would advance their achievements in the classroom. Whether that hypothesis is true or not, one must ask themselves: “Should that matter?”. Should the fact that test scores haven’t improved or that GPAs have not risen be reason enough to stop providing meals to hungry children? Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney commented on the issue by