Anonymous wrote:Lunch is right in the middle of the day. Your kid doesn’t need a snack. Your kid needs to learn to eat breakfast. Being hungry is the perfect natural consequence for this situation. Let it solve this.

Whoa, children whose families are food insecure can't just eat a filling breakfast to solve this situation. Even at schools that serve free breakfast, the kids may get hungry because the breakfasts (bowl of cereal, honeybun, or yogurt) aren't that filling.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lunch is right in the middle of the day. Your kid doesn’t need a snack. Your kid needs to learn to eat breakfast. Being hungry is the perfect natural consequence for this situation. Let it solve this.

Don’t mean to single this poster out but I’m sort of flabbergasted at the responses here. School is for learning. I for one cannot focus if I’m hungry and young students can’t either. It seems like it’s teacher discretion to allow snack or not…. Some people are grazers and being starving by lunch is just not okay

They’ll learn to eat at appropriate times or be hungry. School is not for catering to every persons whims.

Anonymous wrote:Lunch is right in the middle of the day. Your kid doesn’t need a snack. Your kid needs to learn to eat breakfast. Being hungry is the perfect natural consequence for this situation. Let it solve this.

+100. This is exactly why some schools institute a portion of lunch as quiet lunch. So kids will shut up and actually eat.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We never had snacks in ES. School started at 8:30 and lunch was 11:30.

snack should be an apple or other healthy item. Childhood obesity, and all that.

Why are so many people responding with that they did when they were children? 20 or more years ago?!

Because human beings have not yet evolved in a way that is biologically distinct from our predecessors 20 years ago.

The kids also have less than 20 minutes to eat lunch, by the time they get to the lunchroom and buy their food. It’s not a workable solution to say they just need to fill up at lunch, when we aren’t giving them enough time to fill up.

Anonymous wrote:We never had snacks in ES. School started at 8:30 and lunch was 11:30.

snack should be an apple or other healthy item. Childhood obesity, and all that.

Why are so many people responding with that they did when they were children? 20 or more years ago?!

Anonymous wrote:Lunch is right in the middle of the day. Your kid doesn’t need a snack. Your kid needs to learn to eat breakfast. Being hungry is the perfect natural consequence for this situation. Let it solve this.

Don’t mean to single this poster out but I’m sort of flabbergasted at the responses here. School is for learning. I for one cannot focus if I’m hungry and young students can’t either. It seems like it’s teacher discretion to allow snack or not…. Some people are grazers and being starving by lunch is just not okay

Yeah, no, lunch time is all over the place. It starts at 10:30am and doesn't wrap up until 2pm. There are students impacted by this schedule.

Lunch is right in the middle of the day. Your kid doesn’t need a snack. Your kid needs to learn to eat breakfast. Being hungry is the perfect natural consequence for this situation. Let it solve this.

Anonymous wrote:A lot of schools have started to switch to a snack pantry, sponsored by the PTA, because we have too many kids starving and not being able to focus on their studies. I don't see an issue with it, and it doesn't really impact anyone else.

Free breakfast, free lunch, WIC, SNAP?

If a child is still "starving" after those, report parents to CPS because the money is going to drugs, cigarettes or alcohol.

We didn't have snacks in school when we were kids. We all survived. Assuming all food insecurity (kids with not enough food to depend on at home) is taken care of, I think it's better to learn to fight the association of food with boredom and not eat at class between meals. Plus it takes away from instructional time and adds mess and distraction.

Our ES allows snacks, but it depends on whether the classroom teacher allows it or not. This year, DD’s 3rd grade lunch is at 12:30 and there is no snack time. She said the kids were starving at lunch time.

My 3rd grader has a similar lunch time and initially complained of being hungry. It's forced her to eat a bigger breakfast and a bigger lunch, which is a good thing. Prior, she would barely eat breakfast and was iffy about eating lunch because she got a snack at school.

For all the schools I’ve been in, early lunch gets afternoon snack and late lunch gets morning snack. Middle lunch might not get snack. If there is a serious allergy in the class, there is no snack.

I went to school in the 70s and 80s in MCPS and when we had a late lunchtime we always had a snack. My kids who are now in HS and college also had snacks in MCPS. I have a good friend in another state with a child with anaphylactic food allergies and as an accommodation food is prohibited in the classroom so I could see a similar situation impacting school policy. In that case, if my child really couldn’t go without a snack (one of mine was prone to hypoglycemic episodes) I’d see if the pediatrician could write a note for them to leave the classroom for a snack in the office.