Due to budget cuts, a number of popular school lunch options – chicken dumplings, bean, cheese burritos and cookies – would disappear from New York City public schools in February.  This has raised concerns for students who relied on school lunch to go through their full academic day. Parents are also becoming frustrated as their children are not eating till they exit the school building. Mayor Eric Adam’s decided to cut school lunch as a result of the amount of money spent on the migrant crisis. Fox5ny news reported how more than 170,000 migrants have come to New York City in need of housing, food, education and other necessities. 

  Like previously stated, students are going hungry on their day to day as their usual lunch options are no longer available. Today I got the chance to interview D’angelo Castillo, a student from The College Academy. He’s first handedly seen the lunch menu cuts and how it has impacted the students in the campus. During our conversation he expressed how he’s from Dyckman and getting up in the morning and rushing to make it to school on time is already hard enough; and how going a long day without eating on top of that is almost impossible. “How does the educational system expect us to do good in school yet dont fuel us enough to get through a whole day. Our minds are all over the place.” Passionately explained Mr.Castillo. There’s no doubt that the change in school lunch has taken a toll amongst the student body and has negatively impacted students learning ability. 

Now that you have been filled with the basic reasons towards why school lunches are altering, and how it has affected students, I will let you in on another of the students’ opinions from TCA on why this affects not only students but the department of education. According to Jaylah she states that “More students are going to be arriving to school late since they’ll feel more obligated to buy food in the morning.” Students will no longer rely on school food to keep them motivated and hydrated throughout the day which can also affect their performance in school. As we all know school lunches have played a big role in child hunger especially with the new coming students in TCA who are “New New Yorkers”. Jaylah also mentions that “the majority of the food that’s being taken away, is the main meal eaten out of all the other foods on the menu”. This can make anyone feel as though students aren’t being treated the way they’re supposed to be, and lead to potential problems such as protesting or even petitioning for better meals.

There has been an ongoing debate on whether or not schools should improve their menu options for students but now with a 60 million budget cut, it changes the whole situation. Things gradually keep getting worse and if us students don’t act on it as soon as possible there will be extreme tension with the department of education and its students.