ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 18, 1995                   TAG: 9503210020
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IDEOLOGY AND SCHOOL LUNCHES

NO LONGER are the blank stares and bony limbs of chronically malnourished schoolchildren a common sight in the rural South, Appalachia, inner-city slums and other economically distressed parts of America. For that, give a good measure of the credit to federally subsidized school lunches.

Like any other human endeavor, there's always room for improvement. But unlike, say, welfare, school lunches as we know them are a government success story.

Unbeset by fraud or scandal, doing the job for which it was intended, the program has a payback - healthier children better able to learn - that far exceeds its yearly cost of about $5 billion. It not only benefits those poor or working-class children who qualify for full or partial subsidies; it also helps ensure that kids from more middle-class families have convenient access to nutritious fare at an unsubsidized yet inexpensive price.

Why, then, are so many congressional Republicans so insistent on messing with the program?

GOP plans to cut back future funding increases, short of what's needed to accommodate inflation and projected numbers of qualifying children, may look like small school-lunch potatoes. In the overall budget context, it is. But over time, the shortfall would balloon, rather like compound interest in reverse.

A misplaced faith in block grants is also evident in the GOP plan. Devolution of decisionmaking to the states is, in most instances, a good idea. But state leeway to divert up to 20 percent of school-lunch money to other purposes, or to ignore nutritional standards that would become voluntary rather than mandatory, is not "flexibility" worth having. (Advances in scientific knowledge, not a state's fiscal condition, should be the basis by which nutritional standards are updated.)

The current national flexibility to respond to changing local and state economic conditions is worth having - and would be lost with the block-grant approach.

Sometimes, the argument that block grants can save on administrative costs makes sense. Not here. The school-lunch program has a straightforward purpose. It piggybacks on local institutions, the schools, that would exist anyway, and that are happy to participate. In this instance, the notion that 50 state bureaucracies would do better than a single federal one reflects wishful thinking, not solid analysis.

Are the Republicans heartlessly cruel? Of course not. But on school lunches, they're in danger of letting ideological zeal outrun common sense. 


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