Priorities

[Content Note: Food insecurity; child neglect.]

Another terrific example of how every fetus is precious and life is sacred, until those hypothetical fetuses become actual, living children:

Della Curry is out of work, and unashamed, after being fired by the Cherry Creek School District.

A married mother of two, Curry is the former kitchen manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School in Aurora [Colorado]. She lost her job on Friday after giving school lunches to students who didn't have any money.

"I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn't have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her lunch," Curry said.

"Yes, I gave her lunch." The confession of her heinous crime. Giving a hungry child something to eat.

There is a free and reduced lunch program in the district: "To qualify for the free lunch program, a family of four would have to have a household income of around $31,000. To qualify for a reduced lunch, the threshold is below $45,000." Those are very low numbers. Lots of families of four making, say, $46,000, just enough to price themselves out of assisted lunches, might have trouble providing lunches every day for every child. So they go to school hungry.

And those are exactly the students whom Curry was helping—the kids who fall through the cracks because lunch programs are based on arbitrary fixed income cut-offs and not on whether an individual child has food to eat that day.

In the district, students who fail to qualify for the free lunch or reduced lunch program receive one slice of cheese on a hamburger bun, and a small milk.

Curry says that meal is not sufficient. Many times she paid for lunches out of her own pocket. "I'll own that I broke the law. The law needs to change," she said.

...Curry says the students she helped did not qualify for either program. "Kids whose parents make too much money to qualify, but a lot of times they don't have enough money to eat," she said.

...Curry said she understands the school district was just following policy when it fired her. Now she's hoping her story will lead to some changes.

"If me getting fired for it is one way that we can try to change this, I'll take it in a heartbeat," she said.

No one should have to lose her job in order to effect change that makes sure every hungry child is fed. For fuck's sake.

The school district released a statement on Curry's firing, which starts thus: "The law does not require the school district to provide the meal to children who have forgotten their lunch money, that is a district decision."

You know, when one of your employees is willing to risk her job and her own livelihood to make sure that children are being fed, because there are children standing in front of her crying from hunger, maybe you need to be a little less concerned about defending yourself on the basis that you're meeting the bare minimum of what the law requires you to do.