Soupy Saturday
Back Alley Music
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Noon to 3:00 p.m.
I support school breakfast programs – where any student who wants to can get a free breakfast, every school day, before school starts – for entirely selfish reasons: I want the all the kids sitting in [[Oliver]]’s classroom to be well-fed to start off the day. I’m enough of a “if I don’t eat I turn catatonic” to know that having breakfast is an inviolate qualification for being able to learn.
Prince Street School, where Oliver is in grade four, is lucky to have a well-run breakfast program spearheaded by the school’s resource teachers, supported by the Principal and volunteers and stocked with a small amount of core funding, milk donated by Purity Dairy and bagels donated by the Great Canadian Bagel, and from financial donations from near and far.
It’s not an ideal setup: there’s a lot of volunteer time spent by teachers and staff trying to keep the program afloat that could be better spent on, well, learning. In a perfect world breakfast programs would be publicly funded, with paid coordinators and a wider array of healthy food choices. But until that happens, we all rely on the kindness of others to support breakfast programs.
To this end, you’re invited to Back Alley Music (69 University Ave. in Charlottetown) this Saturday, January 22, 2011 from Noon to 3:00 p.m. for Soupy Saturday: there will be soup from Ted Grant (Culinary Institute) on offer, in return for a donation, and entertainment from musicians Tanya Davis, Kelley Mooney, and Peter Winn.
Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Ann Thurlow for shepherding this effort.
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I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
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Comments
In a perfect world parents
In a perfect world parents would take the time to make their kids a nutritious breakfast.
Thanks for the kudos, Peter.
Thanks for the kudos, Peter. But all credit goes to Pat Deighan at Back Alley Music. He has done all the work - I just held out my hand on behalf of the school.
That is the role of a good
That is the role of a good shepherd: the sheep do all the work, but left to their own devices they’d just wanted around aimlessly and without purpose ;-)
You are right. And I used to
You are right. And I used to think “why are we putting all this effort into short-term solutions when what we should really be working on is guaranteed annual income, nutrition education, etc.” But then, well, there’s the kids that arrived at school tomorrow morning without breakfast…
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