Accomplishing the mission of Moffat County School District, to educate and inspire students to thrive in an environment of change, comes down in a lot of ways to creating an environment where every student can learn and grow.
Successfully educating children, it’s been said, can be better compared to growing and nurturing a plant or a garden than building a machine. Whereas the engineer carefully crafts each mechanical piece and manipulates it expertly into place to build a high-functioning machine, children are more like the plants in a garden, which, if provided by the gardener with the necessary conditions for success, grow themselves organically.
Among the critical steps to successfully growing a plant or raising a child is providing both with adequate nutrition. Metaphorically speaking, that’s the task of Moffat County’s expert educators, who “feed” our students with “nutrients” of information, ideas, techniques and training. But, much more literally, that’s also the job of the MCSD Nutrition Department, which is responsible in large part for the literal feeding of Moffat County kids.
MCSD’s nutrition specialists are a dedicated group of talented, passionate people who do far more than most people realize to ensure every Moffat County child has good, healthy food in his or her little (or not-so-little) body so that they can be ready to learn. School meals these days aren’t what some of us remember from our childhoods — they’re far more nutritious and lovingly prepared than ever, not to mention the special care taken for those youngsters with food allergies or specific dietary needs. MCSD Nutrition takes care of them all, and they do it with a smile.
For many years, MCSD schools have had a no-child-turned-away policy, whereby no child who requests food is ever refused or even offered an alternative meal because they cannot pay for the food or because their parent or guardian owes money to the district. Children don’t deserve to be hungry because their adult hasn’t paid for a meal. The district takes that truth seriously.
That food, of course, isn’t free, though. The school district, which has operated these many years on a tight enough budget as it is, had state-level resources into which it can tap in order to pay for the food its students need in the event that the families of those students couldn’t afford to purchase it. Through the Free and Reduced Lunch application program, hundreds of MCSD students’ families are not charged for their children’s school meals, and that money is recouped by the district through state funding available for those who need it most.
Now, thanks to the passage of Proposition FF by Colorado voters, the state provides funding to all participating districts, including MCSD, to provide free breakfast and lunch to all district students, regardless of eligibility status (please note that it is still very important to the district that families continue to fill out Free and Reduced Lunch applications in order to qualify for many critical grants and other key programs that sustain the district’s educational activities).
However, as the district turns over this new page into the Prop FF era, it is still facing a daunting financial issue. Moffat County families — that is, those who have NOT been determined eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch — have racked up more than $32,000 in unpaid school meal debt. That means that children who did not have money in their accounts to purchase food have accrued account deficits into which their parents or guardians owe. Many of these families owe only a handful of dollars here or there, but some owe in the hundreds, and there are an awful lot of families who owe. After sometimes months or more of failed contact with the many, many families of these students, the district is facing the decision of possibly having to eat the debt. Think about that: $32,000-plus in taxpayer money — money that could go much of the way toward paying for a year of another teacher’s salary to better educate our community’s kids, instead goes down the drain.
The truth is a lot of these kids’ families probably qualify for Free and Reduced Lunches but haven’t applied. For those families, MCSD implores that parents and guardians take the very easy step of filling out the application in order to help the district recoup some of that cost. For those who do not qualify, please pay for your kids’ food. A student’s meal debt stays on his or her account until he or she graduates unless it’s paid. The more money a district loses on unpaid debts, the less it can afford to spend on the things that matter most.
Thankfully, this will not be a forever issue. Breakfast and lunch are free to all students at Moffat County School District starting this year. That means, parents and guardians, that you can stop putting quite so much money into your students’ accounts (though we are forever grateful for your proactiveness and your responsibility in helping the district avoid even greater unpaid debt). It also means that the unpaid accounts problem will not be one the district is losing time and money on into the future. While some extras still cost a nominal amount, and the district will continue to require that those extra milks and other items be paid for, the cost to parents is going way, way down.
So help us out. Moffat County School District is proud of its Nutrition Department, of their dedication to keeping kids fed and ready to learn, and also of the district’s longstanding, good-sense policy to not hold children responsible for circumstances over which they have no control. That’s never going to change. But ultimately, money out the door is money out the door. It’s never a waste to feed a child. But, for a district that’s learned well how to do a lot with a little, that much money could go a long way toward feeding our community’s kids better — in every sense of the word.
Credit: Source link