Two Reidsville, NC, middle-school students were suspended because their parents gave them fast-food hamburgers to take to school for lunch. Charles Finney, one of the parents, was rightly indignant:
Finney said the principal told him the school policy does not allow outside food because it competes with child nutrition standards.
“They can’t tell you what to feed your child, as long as it’s in a brown paper bag,” Finney said. “It ain’t no contest. As long as you feed your child, what’s the point?”
The problem is not a parent competing with a school’s nutrition standards, it’s with a school competing with a parent’s decisions about their child. It should not be their business what, when or where a parent feeds a child.
There was a time when the more you removed yourself from large cities the more common sense you found in local bureaucrats. But no more. The norms of the nanny state, pushed by the federal Department of Education and the drones at the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, have seeped even into places like Reidsville.
(h/t Hal Young)
