Whoever said there’s no such thing as a free lunch has never dined with Uncle Sam.
Even as the nation teeters on the edge of the fiscal cliff, the feds have found $30 million in extra lunch money to shower on city schoolchildren in the name of hurricane relief.
New York City’s 1.1 million public-school students can each get a free school lunch every day in December (and could have last month, too) — even if their homes were undamaged by the superstorm or they have no financial need.
Some parents are furious that the feds put this spending ahead of aid for storm victims scrounging for cash to pay for home repair and other basic needs.
“This is so wrong,” said Masayo Chalmers, whose child attends Staten Island’s PS 29. “My friend in Midland Beach couldn’t get any money from FEMA even though she lost everything. She’s the one who needs help, more than my son needs a free lunch.”
New York Sens. Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, who pushed for the funding, say that the blanket offer was meant to cut red tape for families hurt by Sandy.
“It would have taken so long to process all the requests if we had limited the recipients,” said a Gillibrand spokeswoman. “So we said: Let’s just open it up for all kids.”
But critics called the massive outlay irresponsible.
“That’s outrageous at a time when the federal deficit is so high,” argued Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute. “For every dollar spent on a lunch for a child that doesn’t need it, that’s one less dollar that can be spent restoring someone’s home.”
The out-of-whack allocation ignores the hard-hit shore towns in Long Island and New Jersey, even as students in every neighborhood of New York City — including unscathed sections of upper Manhattan, northern Brooklyn, The Bronx and central Queens — are eating their regularly priced $1.50 lunches for free on the taxpayer’s dime.
“How stupid,” said Kathleen Boyer, mother of a PS 65 student in Staten Island. “It’s just a feel-good thing for the politicians to do. Couldn’t this be done on a school-by-school basis? There’s no need to spend millions giving lunch to every kid in the city.”
The city Department of Education could not say how many students had been treated to free lunches in November and won’t know till late January how many meals are served on the house this month.
The USDA said it expects the program to add $30 million to the city’s regular school-lunch reimbursement, but could not detail how that estimate was made. The feds usually reimburse the city $2.94 for a free lunch.