To the editor:

We ate lunch at our daughter’s elementary school (USD 497) Tuesday and were mortified. The children around us ate chips, fake cheese and milk doped with high fructose corn syrup. That’s it. Repeat: Chips for lunch, fake cheese, fake sugar. How has school lunch come to this? Who is running the USDA? (Besides the corn processing association?) Chips are not lunch. They shouldn’t even be in the school building.

The saddest part was yet to come. Next we suffered this heartbreaking scene: The children who had chips as their lunch proceeded to disrupt, misbehave and were cognitively unable to function. It was frustrating for the teacher and the children who were not struggling. Our focus on test scores has become so out of control, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that these children are humans with needs. Where are our priorities?

The real crime is two-fold. The kids having chips for lunch may be children who are in need of quality nutrition most of all, and someone is rich because our nation feeds their schoolchildren chips for lunch. Who will stand up for these children?

Melinda L. Toumi,

Lawrence