Education Secretary Biram Stege said a $700,000 budget cutback in the ministry’s fiscal year 2010 budget forced the end of the lunch program for all Majuro schools.
“When there is a lunch program, attendance is so much better,” Stege said Wednesday. “Students don’t miss class.”
Now, with no lunch program, many students go home or off campus to eat, and the question is, “will they come back to school?” she asks.
Majuro kindergarteners will continue to get a snack, but lunches are history.
“We don’t have the money to fund the lunch program for 2009-10 school year,” she said. The cost to run the program for Majuro last year was $400,000.
Academic results from Marshall Islands public schools rank among the lowest in the Micronesian region, and a 2007 study of attendance at one public school showed that 25 percent of the students were absent every day.
When the lunch program was restarted three years ago, parents in some Majuro schools chipped in to supplement a shortfall in Ministry of Education funding. Parents of students at Marshall Islands High School, the largest public high school in the country, started out paying 25 cents per lunch to support the program, but that support waned during the 2008-09 school year, leaving the ministry to foot the bill, Stege said. In other schools, parents chipped in by making lunches on alternating days or providing some food.
Stege said there are two main problems affecting the Majuro school lunch program:
• The government’s local revenue general fund support for public education in the Marshall Islands amounts to less than 10 percent of Education’s annual budget. Virtually all its $22 million budget for public schools for FY 2010 is from United States funding sources.
• Many parents of students in Majuro’s public schools are from lower income families who cannot afford to pay money for lunches.
“There is nothing from the general fund for the school feeding program,” Stege said. “It is funded totally from the Compact of Free Association or other U.S. programs. Where is our part?”
Stege added: “Many parents cannot afford a few dollars a week. That’s why it’s so important for the government to realize the importance of this program. We need to give school children one meal a day.”
Stege said she brought it up during parliament hearings last week on the new budget, which goes into effect Oct. 1.
She acknowledged that parents have a responsibility to share with the ministry in providing for their children.
“But many parents are at or below the poverty level — their kids are walking to school everyday,” she said. “Who will advocate for them?”
Stege said bluntly that the end of the school lunch program means “attendance will drop.”
The ministry is, however, continuing its feeding program at its two boarding schools on the remote atolls of Jaluit and Wotje.
