Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. Schools - By Sam Dillon - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/education/surge-in-free-school-lunches-reflects-economic-crisis.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all

Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. Schools

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

More than 100 students eat a free dinner daily after classes at Ingels Elementary School in Kansas City, Mo. The Hickman Mills C-1 district feared students would otherwise go to bed hungry.

By SAM DILLON

Published: November 29, 2011

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.

Multimedia

Graphic

Rates of Increase in Subsidized Lunches

The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

The Agriculture Department has not yet released data for September and October.

“These are very large increases and a direct reflection of the hardships American families are facing,” said Benjamin Senauer, a University of Minnesota economist who studies the meals program, adding that the surge had happened so quickly “that people like myself who do research are struggling to keep up with it.”

In Sylva, N.C., layoffs at lumber and paper mills have driven hundreds of new students into the free lunch program. In Las Vegas, where the collapse of the construction industry has caused hardship, 15,000 additional students joined the subsidized lunch program this fall. In Rochester, unemployed engineers and technicians have signed up their children after the downsizing of Kodak and other companies forced them from their jobs. Many of these formerly middle-income parents have pleaded with school officials to keep their enrollment a secret.

Students in families with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty level — or $29,055 for a family of four — are eligible for free school meals. Children in a four-member household with income up to $41,348 qualify for a subsidized lunch priced at 40 cents.

Among the first to call attention to the increases were Department of Education officials who use subsidized lunch rates as a poverty indicator in federal testing. This month, in releasing results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they noted that the proportion of the nation’s fourth graders enrolled in the lunch program had climbed to 52 percent from 49 percent in 2009, crossing a symbolic watershed.

In the Rockdale County Schools in Conyers, Ga., east of Atlanta, the percentage of students receiving subsidized lunches increased to 63 percent this year from 46 percent in 2006.

“We’re seeing people who were never eligible before, never had a need,” said Peggy Lawrence, director of school nutrition.

One of those is Sheila Dawson, a Wal-Mart saleswoman whose husband lost his job as the manager of a Waffle House last year, reducing their income by $45,000. “We’re doing whatever we can to save money,” said Ms. Dawson, who has a 15-year-old daughter. 

“We buy clothes at the thrift store, we see fewer movies and this year my daughter qualifies for reduced-price lunch.”

She added, “I feel like: ‘Hey, we were paying taxes all these years. This is what they were for.’ ”

Although the troubled economy is the main factor in the increases, experts said, some growth at the margins has resulted from a new way of qualifying students for the subsidized meals, known as direct certification. In 2004, Congress required the nation’s 17,000 school districts to match student enrollment lists against records of local food-stamp agencies, directly enrolling those who receive food stamps for the meals program. The number of districts doing so has been rising — as have the number of school-age children in families eligible for food stamps, to 14 million in 2010-11 from 12 million in 2009-10.

“The concern of those of us involved in the direct certification effort is how to help all these districts deal with the exploding caseload of kids eligible for the meals,” said Kevin Conway, a project director at Mathematica Policy Research, a co-author of an October report to Congress on direct certification.

Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to support commodity prices after World War II by reducing farm surpluses while providing food to schoolchildren. By 1970, the program was providing 22 million lunches on an average day, about a fifth of them subsidized. Since then, the subsidized portion has grown while paid lunches have declined, but not since 1972 have so many additional children become eligible for free lunches as in fiscal year 2010, 1.3 million. Today it is a $10.8 billion program providing 32 million lunches, 21 million of which are free or at reduced price.

All 50 states have shown increases, according to Agriculture Department data. In Florida, which has 2.6 million public school students, an additional 265,000 students have become eligible for subsidies since 2007, with increases in virtually every district.

“Growth has been across the board,” said Mark Eggers, the Florida Department of Education official who oversees the lunch program.
In Tennessee, the number of students receiving subsidized meals has grown 37 percent since 2007.

“When a factory closes, our school districts see a big increase,” said Sarah White, the state director of school nutrition.

In Las Vegas, with 13.6 percent unemployment, the enrollment of thousands of new students in the subsidized lunch program forced the Clark County district to add an extra shift at the football field-size central kitchen, said Virginia Beck, an assistant director at the school food service.

In Roseville, Minn., an inner-ring St. Paul suburb, the proportion of subsidized lunch students rose to 44 percent this fall from 29 percent in 2006-7, according to Dr. Senauer, the economist. “There’s a lot of hurt in the suburbs,” he said. “It’s the new face of poverty.”

In New York, the Gates Chili school district west of Rochester has lost 700 students since 2007-8, as many families have fled the area after mass layoffs. But over those same four years, the subsidized lunch program has added 125 mouths, many of them belonging to the children of Kodak and Xerox managers and technicians who once assumed they had a lifetime job, said Debbi Beauvais, district supervisor of the meals program.

“Parents signing up children say, ‘I never thought a program like this would apply to me and my kids,’ ” Ms. Beauvais said.

Many large urban school districts have for years been dominated by students poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. In Dallas, Newark and Chicago, for instance, about 85 percent of students are eligible, and most schools also offer free breakfasts. Now, some places have added free supper programs, fearing that needy students otherwise will go to bed hungry.

One is the Hickman Mills C-1 district in a threadbare Kansas City, Mo., neighborhood where a Home Depot, a shopping mall and a string of grocery stores have closed.

Ten years ago, 48 percent of its students qualified for subsidized lunches. By 2007, that proportion had increased to 73 percent, said Leah Schmidt, the district’s nutrition director. Last year, when it hit 80 percent, the district started feeding 700 students a third meal, paid for by the state, each afternoon when classes end.

“This is the neediest period I’ve seen in my 20-year career,” Ms. Schmidt said.

Robbie Brown and Kimberley McGee contributed reporting.

Zionist Front Page Magazine article - The Dangers of Democracy By Bruce Thortnton

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Comments posted by GM on Front Page article: Dangers of believing in democracy -

Just as Muslim political parties, now ascendent in many Arab countries, have manifestly tried to compromise and come to terms with other liberal and secular co-citizens, it is now time that Liberals and secular citizens too, start cooperating and accommodating majority views that give more emphasis to Islamic percepts even in  daily life, without any necessary political compulsions. In wider Muslim world, there is an overwhelming perception, that it is the Jewish/Zionist elements that have convinced themselves, that countering Islam and Muslim political revival is the only existentialist recourse to the survival of western and Zionist world view. In fact, history is rampant as to how clash of civilizations too end up with new permutations and combinations, without necessarily settling the differences through wars and propaganda.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/30/the-dangers-of-believing-in-democracy%E2%80%99s-magical-powers/

The Dangers of Democracy

Posted by Bruce Thornton Bio ↓ on Nov 30th, 2011 

The parliamentary elections that have begun in Egypt will impress only the most starry-eyed of democracy champions. These are the people who, like Senator Joe Lieberman​, think that the “Arab Spring” is all about people “demanding lives of democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world.” What we’ve seen so far instead is the growing success of Islamist parties demanding a greater role for Islam and shari’a law in running their countries. Our failure of imagination that has reduced events in the Middle East to our own historical paradigms and ideals continues to compromise our foreign policy in that region, and endanger our national interests.

For example, since we prize freedom, human rights, separation of church and state, and tolerance for a variety of ways for individuals to pursue happiness, we think everybody else values or defines those ideas the same way we do. But what we call freedom, many Muslims see as a soul-destroying license and destructive self-indulgence. As the Ayatollah Khomeini​ preached in 1979, such Western-style freedom is a “freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.” Decades earlier, Muslim Brothers​ founder Sayyid Qutb​, along with Khomeini the most critical influence on neo-jihadism, likewise had scorned Western “individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives.” Similarly, al Qaeda theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, “The freedom we want is not the freedom to use women as commodities . . . it is not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual marriage.” For the faithful, true freedom is the freedom to live as an observant Muslim in harmony with Allah’s precepts, something far different from what we in the West mean by political freedom. So too with our ideal of human rights, which in Islamic terms means the right to be a faithful Muslim without any interference. That’s why Article 24 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam reads, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.”

This failure to imagine the world-view of those unlike us is worsened by our failure to understand that “democracy” is more than just the mechanics of voting. As G.K. Chesterton said, “We shall have real Democracy, when . . . the ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but what he is going to vote about.” The evidence of elections in the Middle East so far––in Algeria, Gaza, Lebanon, and Tunisia, which have all seen Islamist parties triumph––suggests that most ordinary Muslims want democracy not to institutionalize Western goods and ideals such as personal freedom, individual rights, or tolerance for minorities, but to integrate more thoroughly Islam and shari’a into government. In Egypt this is the explicit program of the organization poised for success in the democratic elections, the Muslim Brothers. Their 2007 draft platform proclaimed that “Islam is the official state religion” and “the Islamic shari’a is the main source for legislation.” 

Nor are these demands for more religion in government coming just from a well-organized, unified minority. In a Pew poll from 2010, 85% of Egyptians said Islam’s influence on politics is positive, 95% said that it is good that Islam plays a large role in politics, 59% identified with Islamic fundamentalists, 54% favored gender segregation in the workplace, 82% favored stoning adulterers, 77% favored whippings and cutting off the hands of thieves and robbers, and 84% favored death for those leaving Islam.

Nor will we see in Egypt the sort of religious tolerance sanctioned by the Western separation of church and state. So far this year, 80 Christian Copts have been murdered, some by soldiers, and their churches attacked and destroyed. The intolerance that breeds such violence finds its sanction in traditional Islam, at least according to Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Cairo’s prestigious Al Azhar University. Gomaa calls Christians “infidels” and quotes the Koran’s injunction to “Fight … the People of the Book [Jews and Christians] until they pay the Jizya [tribute] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” This faith-sanctioned intolerance explains why only 48% of Egyptians look favorably on Christians, despite the presence of 8 million Christian Copts, and a scant 2% look favorably on Jews. It is hard to see how a liberal democracy as we understand it can flourish in such an environment of intolerance.
Given these faith-based attitudes, if a majority of Egyptians democratically vote for policies that will incorporate the prescriptions from shari’a into government policies and laws, the result will not be anything close to what we mean when we extol democracy and human rights.

Even more important than our simplistic view of democracy, and our blindness to the incompatibility of democratic principles with Islam, is our failure to acknowledge how much more significant religion is for Muslim identity than it is for ours: “In most Islamic countries,” historian Bernard Lewis​ writes, “religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . in no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and accepted in most Muslim countries.” A Pew poll from this year confirms the truth of this observation in Egypt, where 46% of Egyptians identified themselves as Muslims first, while only 31% identified themselves as Egyptians first.

Despite all this evidence for the powerful role of religion in Muslim identity, we continue to understand the Muslim Middle East and jihadism in terms of our own categories and ideals. Thus we have tried to explain Middle Eastern political and social dysfunctions of the last 80 years in terms of nationalism, fascism, communism, economic failure, and now the illiberal dictators whose overthrow will presumably usher in a springtime of liberal democracy and political freedom that will eliminate the conditions creating jihadist terror. But all these Western-imported ideologies and explanations do not find traction with most Muslims, who see their problems as resulting from a crisis in Islam that has allowed peoples who once trembled at Allah’s armies to dominate the world. As Lewis points out, since Islam’s retreat in the 17^th century in the face of European penetration of Muslim lands, “the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.” This observation was confirmed recently by the Muslim Brothers Supreme Guide Muhammad al-Badi’: “The Muslim nation has the means [to bring about] improvement and change . . . It knows the way, the methods, and the road signs, and it has a practical role model in Allah’s Messenger, [the Prophet Muhammad​] . . . who clarified how to implement the values of the [Koran] and the Sunna at every time and in every place.” Al-Badi’ further explains that this “change” will be brought about not by democracy, but by jihad: all Muslim regimes “crucially need to understand that the improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.” Democratic elections thus are a means to an end, not the end itself. As Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan puts it, “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.”

Starting with Iran, for over 30 years we have misunderstood the Middle East because we have refused to acknowledge the role of Islam as the central dynamic of most Muslim hearts and minds. Now we are indulging the magical powers attributed to “democracy” and “freedom” to continue avoiding that truth. As a result, we have colluded in the overthrow of rulers like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak​, who at least served our interests, in favor of Islamist groups explicitly hostile to them, as we may soon find out when democratically elected, illiberal Islamic regimes increasingly pursue policies that threaten our security and interests.