675B: Profligate Waste

The US government strives to do the right thing. They provide food for free to students who attend a designated Title 1 school – which is a school where the poverty rate in the district is high enough that all students who attend there qualify for free breakfast and lunch. All well and good, right? Well – not so much.

Here’s how that munificence actually plays out in at least one locality. My school had a situation arise in this era of no substitutes where nearly 20 of our small high school’s faculty would be out on a given Friday. Being that they were utterly unable to obtain substitutes (not even by making the remaining staff sacrifice their planning periods and cover classes for colleagues) they decided to just make tomorrow a “virtual learning day.” OK – I get that.

However, because we are a Title 1 school and we provide federally funded free food to students daily, that meant our cafeteria staff had to scramble to provide and pack sack breakfasts and lunches for all of our students who would not be present at school to be fed, so they’d have food at home for the virtual learning day (yes we did this each day of virtual learning during the pandemic, too).

So, at the end of our regular instructional day, the admin called students to the cafeteria to collect a bag of food prepared for the next day – a breakfast and lunch. Having experienced this situation previously, I told my class that if they did not want the food that they were provided, to please give it to another student FIRST (because that’s who the food was paid for) but to PLEASE not throw away food, because I (as their teacher) would GLADLY accept food donations. I had one student in that class who took home two full grocery bags (paper bag size, not plastic bag size) that weighed so much he could hardly carry them. I hope his mom was thrilled that her son brought home so much food – probably a hundred dollar’s worth – from school. I ended up with a sizeable bag of food the kids didn’t want (the vegetables, mostly), which I actually will eat.

Class dismissed and students left the building. Then, I went “dumpster diving.” I have no shame. I went classroom to classroom on my hall and mined the trash cans of teachers who obviously did not tell their students not to throw away food. I left the building with EIGHT paper bag sized loads (more than 100 pounds) of food. It took me THREE trips to my car with as much as I could carry each time. Apples, juice, Pop Tarts, fingerling carrots, Ranch dressing, cheese sticks, a few Doritos chips bags. What the kids ate out of the food bags they got? They ate the chips (the least nutritious item in the bag), and the Smucker’s peanut butter and jelly “Uncrustable” sandwiches. They trashed the rest.

When I got home, the workers who were finishing a flooring job for me at home were happy to take home a bag of food. This is what I had left:

A bag of apples at my grocery store costs five bucks. I had at least four bags of retail apples (probably more), red and golden delicious. It’s a good thing I have a food dehydrator – I can preserve them for apple pies later this winter. I had almost two quarts of Ranch dressing. I got dozens of cheese sticks. I got well over a gallon of fruit juice (which I do not usually buy myself because it’s expensive) and I am enjoying it thoroughly this evening with Captain Morgan’s Black Spiced Rum. I got LOADS of Pop Tarts (which I won’t eat, either). I’m sending those with my husband to his job site where he has co-workers who have small children who will enjoy them. I have enough fingerling carrots to eat them daily at lunch and dinner for about three weeks. Good thing I like them!

I get it that our school has a high poverty rate in our district and we qualify for federal food assistance for all of our students. HOWEVER. This has happened over and over again in my county. Because I abhor waste, I will trash dive to recover perfectly good food our students throw away. What this means is that I look forward to “days off” when students are provided food, because I take home hundreds of dollars worth retail cost food per year – every time that I rescue from the trash what the students discard.

I am benefitting. I am not the one who is supposed to be benefitting. Still, I’m not going to let the perfectly good food just be thrown away – that’s just WRONG. *sigh*

How to fix this? I do not know. Since I can’t fix it, I will continue to save food that would be trashed. Maybe this is a job benefit?

667: Struggling as a Teacher in the Age of COVID-10

I am a public school teacher (high school) and I happen to teach in rural Georgia, in the USA. I am really struggling this academic year. Last year was tough enough, when face-to-face school got called off one Friday in March and we were all teaching virtually on the following Monday.

I was teaching English last year, but I had some advantages over other teachers when we were suddenly all virtual. I have several professional certifications, including a Master’s in Technology Education (I started my teaching career as a Shop teacher (Industrial Arts for 18+ years), and I am all-but-dissertation status on a Doctorate degree in Online Learning. So, I had a leg up on going all-virtual over many other teachers. And it was still challenging, given that I am a conscientious teacher who actually tries to do what the administration says I am supposed to do, while at the same time doing all I can do to meet the needs of my students (not always the same thing). I went from my normal 10-11 hour day (manageable) to a 14-16 hour day (if things went well, more hours if things didn’t).

This year, our small, rural school started school pretty much on time at the first of August (even though there was lots of controversy about COVID-19). So far, our concern and adherence to CDC guidelines has kept COVID mostly at bay. Our small school is a federal Title 1 school, meaning that our poverty rate is high enough that every child in the county qualifies for free breakfast and lunch at school. Partly because of this status, we have also been awarded several grants that have enabled our little school system to provide one-to-one access to laptop computers for our students, something many of the surrounding county public schools do not have. All of our students do not have Internet access at home, but nearly all do.

Our teaching model this year has been a hybrid so far: parents and students had the choice to come to school for face-to-face instruction, or to work in a totally online platform – and about 30% of our student body opted to study at home, many stopping by school daily to pick up food packages from the federal school lunch program which they all qualify for. The rest have had traditional F2F instruction, with a heavy reliance on digital content using their school-provided laptop computers.

Slowly, we have been teaching our students how to use their devices in various ways to facilitate learning online, in case the federal or state government overrules our county’s Board of Education and closes the schools. They have learned to live conference, so we can teach live content. We should be able to continue live instruction remotely, with the teachers holding class at school and the students logged in, learning at home. A regular school day, all online. Our little school system will be, as far as we know, the first one in our state to do this.

Is it challenging? Sure, it is. Our infrastructure in our small, rural county in Georgia isn’t on a par with what people are accustomed to in urban Atlanta, or in the other, larger cities in our state. We don’t have 5G. When it rains, we blink out. Still, we can do this. Do we struggle? Sure, we do.

Still, it is a new world. Do I run the numbers to see if I CAN retire, instead of finishing out the last years I was planning to teach? At least once a month. I’m eligible to retire – I’m just not ready to, even as difficult, challenging, and annoying as this current school year is working out to be. I can still make a difference, and help some student along. That’s all I was ever in it for.