CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Two Ways to Feed a School

MAN: Good evening. The Harrowgate Falls School Board is reviewing how it feeds students at midday. For six years it has run a targeted program: families below a set income line apply once a year and receive a lunch card for each child. Trustees are now being asked to replace it with a universal program that would give every student the same lunch at no charge. A survey of two thousand households in Harrowgate Falls found broad agreement that no child should sit through the afternoon hungry, and no settled view at all about who ought to pay for lunches that families could afford themselves. Pilar Vandenberg chairs the board's finance committee. She puts the yearly cost of the targeted program at about nine hundred thousand dollars and the universal version at roughly two and a half million. Vandenberg does not treat that gap as decisive. The board, she notes, would drop the staff time now spent checking applications, and would stop printing and replacing lost cards. She will not take the money from anywhere but the province, and would vote for universal lunches only if the province committed to the difference for five years. Ilkka Wetherby, who speaks for the Harrowgate Falls teachers' association, sees the problem elsewhere. His members spend hours each September collecting forms, and a school office clerk ends up knowing which children hold cards and which do not. That, he says, is the real complaint about the present arrangement. The food, he adds, is fine; what marks a child out is being identified at the till in front of a line of classmates. Wetherby accepts that the universal plan would cost more, but says the board is comparing the wrong things. Sinead Yelverton, principal of Marrowfield Public School, has run the program in her building since it began. Her figures are the ones critics point to. Of the families her office believes are eligible, fewer than two-thirds return the form. Some miss the deadline, some never read the letter, and some would rather go without than sign a paper saying they cannot afford lunch. Yelverton adds a second number that draws less attention: of the children whose applications are turned down, about one in eight lives in a household sitting just above the line. The compromise before trustees would make lunches universal in schools where more than half the students already qualify, and leave the forms in place elsewhere. Trustees vote in November.