THE IMPACT OF THE CRISIS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN FEEDING

Everybody knows the crazy meal times in Spain. In the future perhaps we’ll talk about this custom and we’ll be able to find out that it is not as traditional as most of people believe.

Spanish meal times have a direct relation with primary school timetables. Usually classes starts at 9 AM and by 1 PM there are a two hours (!!!)  break to have lunch.  After that kids start again their work till 4 or 5 PM.  Such a long lunch break is not only used to eat but also to follow the so-called “out-of-school activities” (even whether the activities take place at the school) as chess or foreign languages courses or simply they play different sports.  But we’ll focus our attention on having lunch at school.

Catering firms are usually in charge of feeding kids at school. Parents have to pay this service -used for most of the children- even in free state schools.  But things are changing due to the current economic crises because an increasing number of parents can’t afford pay the bill. Let’s see the three most habitual situations.

First of all I’ll tell you my own experience. Some weeks ago I attended a Parent’s Association meeting at the school where my son studies. I think interesting underline that it’s a middle-class lay school where most of parents (both members of the couple) used got a job (may be now one or both of them are unemployed). This kind of meetings often was devoted to inform about the academic guidelines or activities of the school but this time a new item was introduced in the agenda. We were warned that a significant number of people didn’t pay the catering bill. The school board had decided not to prevent any child to have lunch up to now but such a level of non-payments was unsustainable.

We can find two more expressions of the same problem. As a result of the increasing difficulty to pay school catering services lot of children bring their own lunch from home.  The problem is that there are not foreseen place to this sort of lunch: school canteens are reserved only to catering services and there are not even microwaves available to heating the homemade meals.

Finally, the most serious expression of the problem. Some parents are reluctant to show their economic difficulties so their kids come back home to lunch. The problem lies in a part of these children don’t come back to school and they miss the afternoon classes as well as they can’t take part of “out-of-school” activities.

So you can realize that the economic crisis and the adjustment policies have lot of unexpected faces.

PS. Once again I apologize for my English. All grammatical or syntactic corrections are welcome.