You’re comparing the NY state education budget against a program for elementary school students in NYC using numbers from different decades.

If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.

Which decades? Are you saying the $5M number is too small because this article was from 2017, and I used budget from 2024? Okay, the NY state budget in 2017 was a bit over $25B. That actually still leaves the answer at two hundredths of one percent, since I rounded up and left lots of room for error. ;)

I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.

2010s and 2020s are the two different decades.

I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%.

> I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right?

You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less.

These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.

I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.

I was replying to an “it pays for itself” comment and looking for the most favorable possible numbers for the most limited incremental change to the program, to show that even then, it doesn’t pay for itself. That’s where the $5M comes from—it’s the incremental cost, to the city, of providing free lunches to an additional 35,000 elementary school students, after the federal government reimburses $3.24 per lunch, using data from 2015.

I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue.

The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget.

I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.

I agree with you that the cost of lunch food adds up and is more than the cost of accounting. Substantial is a subjective word but true if looking at the number by itself, and feeding 2 million kids in NY state will obviously be a big number compared to most people’s salaries, which is why it seems substantial. But it’s still a small fraction of the cost of education, and food is a single line item in a much much bigger budget. We can’t actually separate the lunch costs, when you include the cafeteria. It seems very strange that we don’t ask families to pay for books or bus rides but do ask them to pay for lunch. It very much feels like a conscious choice to ensure the poor kids are identified.

There was a scandal in the neighborhood I live in because one school tired of lunch debt was making the hot lunches, letting the kids pick them up, and then taking them away and throwing them in the trash, to make a big show of parents not paying their lunch bills. That saved no dollars and punished the children for what the parents did, poor children disproportionately. Even though most of the kids’ families could afford the lunches, that’s just a shitty thing to do.

The cost actually is small, in the big picture. The truth is that the U.S. can easily afford to pay not just for lunch but for all of education, both elementary and higher education, and it pays for itself many times over, if we look at the extra income tax people with degrees pay over people who don’t have any higher education. We are choosing to not give our kids college degrees by default, and we are choosing to withhold hot lunches from elementary school kids, and it is not because it costs a lot, it would be trivial to fund (and we already proved that during COVID.) It’s because we have politics and a social belief system that is allergic to the idea of free lunch, regardless of the costs.