When my daughter attended a public elementary school, she brought home a very unusual homework assignment. It was a free lunch application. When I said I wasn’t going to fill it out, she said that if I didn’t, she would receive a zero for homework. So I wrote “No thanks” in large red letters, signed it, and sent it back, reasoning that they just wanted to be sure that every parent had received the form. She received a zero for the “assignment” and brought home a new application the next day.
I confronted the teacher and the principal about this coercive behavior. My daughter never went without lunch. Every single day, she either brought her lunch, or had lunch money. In light of that, I explained that it was none of the schools’ business how much money my husband and I earned. They explained patiently, as if I were a particularly slow child, that they still needed the form completed. It’s required, they said. I explained – rather less patiently – that they had no right to the information and if they kept penalizing my daughter for it, not just the school board, but a friend of mine at the Times Picayune would be hearing about it. They finally backed down, but based on their shock at my reaction, I would be willing to bet that every other parent in the school submitted a completed form. And parents who previously fed their own children stopped doing it, and allowed the state to feed them instead.
I’m not against welfare and social programs for people who need them. I lost my husband when I was four months pregnant. I’m not ashamed of the fact that for the remainder of my pregnancy and until my daughter was about a month old and I got a job, I received welfare benefits. I also enjoyed state health insurance coverage for her for another three months until the insurance coverage at my job kicked in. The minute I could get off the dole, I did.
Right now the big issue is whether SCHIP should be expanded – and that IS the issue, not whether it should exist at all – to cover middle class families. Depending on who you believe about the income requirements, my daughter might be eligible for “free” coverage.
It’s pretty clear that the Frost family is not the ideal poster family for this program, since they can’t even see fit for at least one parent to work full time at a steady job. But one point that seems to be lost in the shuffle is that they already qualified, and that they were in no danger of losing their benefits – President Bush did not want to completely shut down the program. He signed an expansion to keep it going. What he vetoed was a huge expansion of SCHIP.
If we are eligible, we absolutely will not take advantage of it. Because “taking advantage” is exactly what it would be. It is my right and my privilege to provide financially for my daughter. I’m not going to allow anyone to take that away from me. This is my one chance to get it right and to raise a responsible young woman who will be a net benefit to society. Showing her that it’s okay to abdicate your responsibility and mooch off of other people when we could take care of ourselves is NOT the way to get that job done.
There’s more at stake than just money. It’s time for the adults in this country to step up and BE adults. It’s time to choose to be independent. For the sake of the children.
