Neither my grade school or high school had or have cafeteria's. Lunchboxes or brown bags. Though they had hot lunches on Wednesday, made by volunteers (mostly grandparents), at low cost, no freebees. Granted I went to private school.
Really haven't understood why cafeteria's are even necessary. Schools have enough to do as it is. Why is it necessary to do all this non-education nonsense? School employ far too many people doing nothing to do with eduction, they shouldn't be operating food service, social services or have all these administrators that you can't figure out what they do all day.
Its telling how schools have changed and not for the better. The public school my mom taught at was built in 1960. 12 classrooms, a gym with storage room, kitchen, stage and office for the gym teacher, a teachers lounge and bathroom, an open office for the secretary and one private office for the principal and a pair of restrooms. Far from a fancy building, plain modernism, brick and concrete, no a/c , as nobody would put up with something fancy (I found an article about the construction of the building and people were questioning why a kitchen was included).
When opened the school building employed 13 teachers, two janitors, a secretary, a part time librarian and nurse (shared with other schools in the district) and the principal. So 17 people and 2 that were sometimes there.
That meant by the time my mom retired in 2005, there was no "offices" for the full time school nurse, the second secretary, the THREE full time social workers, the one part timer, the full time librarian, the IT guy, the TWO assistant principals and one more janitor. Plus one district person that didn't work for the school itself, but worked out of the building (never did figure out what she did except annoy the hell out of the teaching staff, maybe an HR person or union hack?). So 11 additional non teaching staffers.
So some of these people needed offices, so the gym teacher loses his office and storage room (so his deck and equipment is in the gym itself), the stage is divided up and the janitors lose two of the three janitors closets (so that equipment is in the hall too). Oh, the gym is also the place hot breakfasts lunches are served, so the gym classes are scaled back. No more programs can use the stage either.
Oh, by the way the building had decades of deferred maintenance. It hadn't really been changed at all over the decades. Except for sloppy paint jobs by very lazy union painter and dividing walls in the 12 classrooms when the small class size craze came around. So there were more teachers, I believe 8 more.
So they when from 17 full time+2 part timers in 1960 to 36full time + a part timer by the late 1990's.
Oh, by the way, the amount of students in the building in 1960, 600. By the time the population of the employes doubling, 300. HMMMMMMMMM
What have taxpayers gotten with all those new staffers? In 1960, the school district was one of the best in the state, by 1990, one of the worst (granted the neighborhood went from solid working class to non working poor).
