GREENVILLE - Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."
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Later in his speech, Bauer said, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period." ... "You go to a school where there's an active participation of parents, and guess what? They have the highest test scores. So what do you do? You say, ‘Look folks, if you receive goods or services from the government and you don't attend a parent-teacher conference, bam, you lose your benefits.'"...
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And what's this about bar graphs? You're saying here that... kids are getting low test scores... because they're on free lunch? Yeah, that makes sense. We all know how increasingly unhealthy our nation's school lunches are, and it's hard to achieve without those basic building blocks.
Just kidding! You're saying kids are on free lunch because their parents are too lazy to work! Why would they need to, if their kids are getting lunch for free? Of course! And said parents are also too lazy to care about their kids at all -- far too lazy to come in for a parent-teacher conference.
I mean, it's not like they've got anything else to do -- working multiple minimum-wage jobs with no benefits, for example, or taking care of young kids, or taking care of sick relatives who also didn't have a good job with health benefits, or losing hours a day to buses because there's no money to fix the car but the only affordable daycare center is on the far side of town. Those are all things that take up no time in a person's day! And furthermore, it's clear that a child's academic performance is entirely the job of the parent -- it's a personal responsibility issue. That's why we don't need to give any money to schools!
I'm posting this in the youth forum, but I'm not entirely certain it belongs here.