NYC Educator: Brunch in NYC Schools

NYC Educator: Brunch in NYC Schools:

Brunch in NYC Schools

The NY Daily News has discovered that lunch is served very early in city schools. I'm not particularly sure why, under 20 years of GOP mayors, that this escaped their attention. This is not remotely new. It turns out that, when you overload buildings and fail to create sufficient space, you can't fit kids on a reasonable schedule. When you look at empty space in a building as an opportunity to privatize, and dump new schools into existing buildings, you can't fit kids on a reasonable schedule.

Physics are a factor in this. If you place 5,000 kids in a building, and only 500 fit in a cafeteria at a given time, it follows that to give them all lunch, you need to have ten periods of lunch. In my school, which has run up to 13 periods, we know this very well. In fact, I'd venture that just about any school that needs trailers is overcrowded.

There is a simple solution to this problem. All you need to do, if there are too many kids to offer reasonable lunch times, is:

A. place fewer kids in buildings, or
B. expand the capacity of school cafeterias

However, it's likely that neither of those things, in itself, will solve the issue of rampant overcrowding. That may involve creating more space, and indeed a whole lot more space than Emperor Bloomberg conceived of. In fact, that will cost a great deal of money, and the traditional mode of government obtaining said money, taxes, is viewed as a plague by leaders like Andrew Cuomo.

Mayor Bloomberg said he would get rid of school trailers by 2012. He later clarified, explaining that he would not get rid of school trailers by 2012.