Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

The problem is that each board, in fact each school, then has to decide whether or not their lunch supervision is essential or a frill for their particular students, or even sub-groups of students. In my school area, about half the kids live far enough away to make walking logistically nearly impossible, and those happen to include almost all of the poorest students (the buses go to and from a subsidized housing area.) But there are three students I know of in my class alone who live close enough to go home for lunch, and whose parents could arrange it around their current schedules, mostly because they're home with younger kids anyway. There are at least three more in my class of twenty-three, who have a babysitter who lives nearby, who is paid to take care of them before and after school. That's six kids out of twenty-three who we are supervising at lunch hour when other people are available who would have had that responsibility within my lifetime.

Clearly, in rural areas, neither busing nor lunch supervision is, or should be, on the table. I'm not so sure about urban areas. In particular, I think full-day junior kindergarten is ridiculous. Most four-year-olds simply can't handle that day. Our kindergarten teachers dread the last hour of the day, because it's the hardest time of the day to corral those kids and keep a lid on their behaviour.