no if you read the article, the tax payers are paying for this. The district gets reimbursed from the federal government. See its not enough that you already pay for all the food stamps and welfare and medicaid, Not to mention OBAMACARE thats coming down the pike, but now breakfast for the children. This has been going on in Chicago for years and actually parents can also go for free breakfast in the city. See when you just keep taxing and taxing and taxing you keep spending and spending and spending. The federal government is broke but yet they are giving away free breakfast. Isn't that wonderful.

Not all of the kids receiving free breakfast REALLY need it sure, but what about those that do? Not every kid has parents at home that care whether or not they eat breakfast or lunch for that matter. And not every kid who needs help will ask for it, or has the parents to ask for them. Having been a kid who struggled through for clothing and food and other basic necessities I can tell you things like this make a difference. And a program like this wouldn't exist unless it was needed. Have a heart eh?

because illinois has more people with their hands out then pay for anything hence why are state is 15 billion in the whole. If you did not hear QUINNOCHIO speak the other day at the CEMOCROOK convention; he was proud that the public sector hired 65% more workers. I ask you all the questions I keep asking all I see and talk to, Who is paying for all those public sector employees????

Catherine, would it be too hard to read the article? Nobody said that ALL of the students were/are poor. The article did say, however, that "59-percent of the school’s students come from low-income families, that’s nearly almost double District 15’s average of 31.9-percent."

the educational system thats broke. Well people of Illinois, just keep watching your real estate taxes. They are tied in to the school systems and that is why they kep going up. On top of the free breakfast all the teachers in the palatine school district all just got taises just like mine did here in my suburb. You see, if you continue to vote for the democrooks that are in power in this state you will never fix the FREE stuff. Remember there is only one state in our path from being dead last in fiscal responsibility

of course they do. the school board is part of the problem. they are a political arm of the democrooks

James, what would you know about the D15 school board? I thought you were a resident of D230?

As it happens, the D15 school board has four fiscally conservative members on it, three of whom were elected in a clean sweep against the CTC-endorssed candidates back in 2011. And yet they seem to be ok with it. Is it just possible, that they see an educational value in the program?

Bucephalus, is it just possible that the BOE had no previous idea that this program even existed until it hit the newspaper and Patch? I did a quick scan of previous board minutes to see if this was a discussion topic and/or voted upon by the BOE but couldn't find anything. Perhaps I missed it? If you could provide some details on whether this program ever came up during a board meeting, I would greatly appreciate it.

As to the "fiscal conservatives" that are on the board, I see no evidence to indicate their fiscal "conservativeness". This is the first budget that the 1-3-5 group had an active involvement in since their election in April 2011 and they just signed up for a $5 million deficit with more deficits projected in the future. This budget, by any measurement, is an abject failure in meeting any goals associated with "fiscal conservatism".

Oh good, there is this idiot Bucephalus who has grandiose talk, but no follow up. Again, I ask, invite all over to your home to cook breakfast. You seem so intent to tell others, but you don't do it yourself. Besides, I don't even think you live in Palatine!!

I'm sorry Palman, when did you previously ask me to invite you over to my house?

You can cast aspersions all you want, but I have lived in Palatine for the last three years and even own a house three blocks from downtown.

i suggest you go back and read how many of them have not been attached to any school. You cant put overpriced superintendants or assistant superintendants or ex pricipals or sitting principals on any of these boards. You need to put 7 taxpayers that work in the private sector and run a business that understand when the business is not making any profit no one gets raises or free lunch or more health care for nothing etc etc. NO means no. See bucephalus, like I told you before, you are a liberal. You have no clue, you just rattle your liberal crap out of your mouth and it makes no sense. What does experience have to do with running an education system. The illinois state board of education in springfield sets the curriculum all these persons do is push around a bunch of paper, do not have any fiscal reponsibility and then dump it in the hands of the taxpayers. If I ran my business like these spend happy school districts do in illinois, I would not be in business. But see a liberal just thinks money comes from the money ferry. See in the real world, ther is no money ferry. As I have heard, this is how a liberal thinks; "that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of crap by the clean end. "

James, a simple question. Is it possible to have a difference of opinion with you, to disagree with you on school matters, and yet not be an idiot? I certainly have better things to do with my time than to watch you spout your mouth off to make yourself feel better.

For the record James, of the 1-3-5 members elected in 2011, NONE of them have any experience in education and prior to their election, NONE of them had ever been employed by a school district. Do you have any facts otherwise or should I just listen to you spout the same crap off about how I know nothing?

Not on the Board of Education.

Not on the Board of Education.

Not on the Board of Education.

Not on the Board of Education.

Not on the Board of Education.

Not on the Board of Education.

Student services is director of special education. Should a former special educator not be a director of special education??? I see a whole lot of nonsense on here.

Not on the Board of Education.

Since you seem ignorant of what the Board of Education is, much less how they are the ones who make decisions, I have a hard time believing anything you say. You claim to be a successful business owner, but if you run your business as well as you spout off about the Board of Education, then I'm sure you've run a half-dozen businesses into the ground.

Here's District 15's Board of Education:
- Timothy Millar, President
- Scott Herr, Vice President
- Peggy Babcock, Secretary
- Richard L. Bokor
- Gerard Iannuzzelli
- David W. Seiffert
- Manjula Sriram

http://www.ccsd15.net/pages/CCSD15/Board_of_Education_Group

Not one of them was on your "list" of "board" members. Perhaps you should spend ten seconds of effort to actually have some idea about what you're talking about. It helps you not look like a complete idiot.

Yet another "mistake" from james. Boy you sure do make a lot of mistakes when you are telling me about the school district I live in.

Perhaps if you don't like insults you should not cast them as often? You do not know me either, but since I disagree with you, you decide to cast insults upon me, insults such as:
- "you are a liberal. You have no clue,"
- "But see a liberal just thinks money comes from the money ferry" (I think you meant "fairy," but we wouldn't want to inconvenience you by expecting you to know the correct spelling of words)

And let's not get into all the times back in June you decided I was an idiot because I disagreed with you. If you want to think I'm an idiot, fine. If you want to call me an idiot, go right ahead. But don't expect me to sit back and think you're an angel of truth and wisdom.

You make "mistakes" more often than you actually hit upon something true. If you would stop to listen to other people, other viewpoints, and didn't immediately berate anyone who didn't agree with you, perhaps something more would be achieved here. But this is the Patch, where derogatory comments and inflammatory rhetoric are fine and nothing seems to be inappropriate.

james - I don't normally agree with bucephalus but you're making yourself look like an idiot now. With the exception of Rich Bokor (who is a retired teacher) non of the remaining people have ties back to education. I know most of the members and they have real private sector jobs.

ok scott

So let's have a little fun with some numbers. Last year, let's assume when this program was pretty much run just as a free and reduced meal program it broke even after federal reimbursement of $1.51/meal. Now the number of meals has exploded by 500%! Let's say most of the new participants showing up for breakfast now, don't qualify for reimbursement and we'll peg that number at 300 meals/day. And we'll use an average cost/meal of $1.51. That puts the unreimbursed daily cost of this program at $453/day or $2,265/week or over the course of a year approximately $81,000. I'll bet when the BOE was desperately trying to find items to cut when developing this year's budget, they didn't decide to sign up for spending a potential incremental $81K for free breakfast program.

charles like i always say, the schools know that they have no one to stand in their way and they will continue these programs until the state goes bancrupt. This has been going on for years in the city of chicago and look at how broke the public schools are in the city. They even provide for the parents of low income families to come and get free breakfast. You know the NON-TAXPAYER.

Do you have any source that says parents of low income families get free breakfast or are you just talking out of your ass again?

I can say things without sources too: I heard that james urban's companies receive low-interest state loans to stay afloat!

james, there seems to be a lot you don't care about: facts, truth, reality, other people's opinions. But for the sake of argument, here is where the schools have the justification.

Constitution of the State of Illinois

ARTICLE X: EDUCATION
SECTION 1. GOAL - FREE SCHOOLS
" ...The State shall provide for an efficient system of high
quality public educational institutions and services."
http://www.ilga.gov/commission/lrb/con10.htm

The schools are the institutions, the breakfast is the service enabling the efficient system. A student, who for whatever reason, is hungry (be it their parents' choice not to feed them or their inability to be fed), does not learn. Hunger prevents learning. Ensuring that students who are in school learn is a good way to ensure that your tax dollars aren't being wasted on students who aren't learning.

thats a stretch. I just read what you sent me and there is no where in that article x that states a free breakfast. see you are a liberal and you take the word free education to mean eating because then they learn better. what a stretch. what screwed up thinking you have. Its all about interpretation and you interpret FREE education different than I and I guess we should add on to ARTICLE X to say this includes free breakfast since when is the edcuation system free. According to the last statistic I heard its something like $16,000 per year per student. So where does free come in. Oh, I know where free comes in, the people who live in aprtments and "housing projects" do not pay taxes so I guess its free for them.

And to your other fact checking crap you throw at me since you are one who believes everything you read on the interenet, i have (2)sisters that teach in the CPS and they tell us the things that go on in the schools that do not get reported. so I have to say hands on knowledge and one of my sisters has been a teacher in the CPS for almost 20 years.

"i have (2)sisters that teach in the CPS and they tell us the things that go on in the schools that do not get reported. so I have to say hands on knowledge and one of my sisters has been a teacher in the CPS for almost 20 years."

Ohhhhhh!!!! Your unnamed sisters! How could I have been so stupid?

Well, since james urban's two unnamed, unknown, unverified sisters have claimed that there are free meals being given to adults I guess this conversation is over. Thank you unknown sister 1 and unknown sister 2 for correcting me. I am glad james was able to correct my internet fact checking with some anonymous internet information.

nothing like stretching it thanks for checking at 31% which is 12% lower than your bloated figure and the article is about free breakfast not about how many comments I make but see in illinois we have people that just agree with getting screwed because we are so accustomed to getting screwed that we seem to get mad when someone disagrees with the norm and this is now 18 of 55. want to try you math again product of the illinois public schools

At least Bruce can spell. You might want to try your English again("you math," nice typing there).

While the board's at it, they might as well ask the superintendent whether he still believes his comment in the DH which stated: "District 15 Superintendent Scott Thompson said the pilot breakfast program isn’t costing taxpayers anything on a local level." Then the board should ask itself, given the FY13 $5 million deficit, the stumbling/bumbling deficit reduction exercise, future deficits as far as the eye can see, and this little fiasco, whether they have the right senior management team in place. In the immortal words of Casey Stengel when referring to his completely inept NY Mets: "Can't anybody here play this game?"

Part 1:
Charles, the cafeteria funds you are so hung up on don't appear out of thin air. You ask who is paying for the teacher to eat alongside the students? The answer is the teacher. Where has it ever been stated that teachers in D15 don't pay for their own lunches, or in this case breakfast? The program clearly states it is for children whose parents can't/aren't feeding them. Perhaps if you try hard enough you can make up some rationalization that the teachers are freeloading breakfast off the backs of Palatine's taxpayers (which doesn't seem to include you). I would encourage you to read the D15 budget and look at Account 1620, "Sales to Adults."

Now, let's dig deeper into your mythical $81,000 cost for the program. For starters, let's look at the Annual Financial Report for 2011, the 2012 one isn't due to the Regional Office of Education until October 15th and the ISBE till November 15th so it is the most recent one we have to work with. Let's look at Page 38, where Federal Awards came from. The School Breakfast program for 7/1/10-6/30/11 received funds from both PY 10 and PY 11. Those two figures total $279,805 in federal funding. That number neatly aligns with Page 12 Line 196 which is the revenue for the School Breakfast Program. Additionally, on Page 29 Line 107 the state made a contribution to the program, but since the $78,114 covers both lunch and breakfast it is impossible to tell how much of that went to each meal.

Part 2:

So now that we know most of where the money coming in is from, let's see if we cant figure out how much these breakfasts cost. The district coughed up $1,610,390 in terms of "supplies and materials" (Page 16 Line 62). The other expenses, most notably salaries and benefits, are unchanged based on the number of students served. Each school needs a certain number of workers to make the kitchen work and staff the lines whether there are 10 students eating or 500 students. The only thing that changes appreciably based on the number of students are the supplies they use. Now, District 15 has also made clear how many meals they serve. A year earlier, in 2009-2010, they served 1,272,000 meals, in a year where enrollment was smaller and the federal reimbursement over $100k less. http://www.ccsd15.net/pages/CCSD15/About_District_15/AboutDistrict15

At that math each meal cost $1.27. Even if we factor in purchased services, to account for various expenses that arise out of the ordinary and are otherwise unforeseen, that only raises the average meal cost to $1.31. The federal reimbursement is still 20¢ higher than the cost there, and that also does not include the portion of state reimbursement going to breakfast and not lunch. Which brings us to lunch.

Part 3:
Lunch options, at least when I was in school, were far more varied than the breakfast options. Variety brings up costs and reduces the competitive advantage of quantity. This program is clear that the breakfast option is the same each day. While the fresh fruit might change, there is a Department of Defense grant supplementing that to the tune of $46,851 (Page 38).

So your mythical $81,000 comes from nowhere. You never explained why the average cost of a meal was $1.51 when the point of the federal reimbursement was to cover the cost of the meals. Strangely, though, it appears as if you just took that amount of federal reimbursement and assumed it was not going to happen. If your math was right, then yes the cost of 300 students would be $81,000 a year.

But your math isn't right. There is federal reimbursement, there is state reimbursement, there is DoD reimbursement, and the meals just plain don't cost that much.

The $1.51 average cost/meal is an estimate based on the FY12 Federal Reimbursement rate for breakfast. I am assuming the district's cost equals the reimbursment rate. It could be higher or it could be lower. I thought it was a fair proxy for determining the average cost of a breakfast meal. The FY12 federal reimbursement rates were Free=$1.51, Reduced=$1.21, and Paying students=$0.27 per meal. I am assuming there has been no material change in those rates for FY13. The problem arises with giving free luches to students that DO NOT qualify for the inflated reimbursement rates. This school, according to the DH, had approximately 130 students approved for Free/Reduced reimbursement. They now are reporting approximately 500 students getting free meals. Its safe to assume that the huge spike in participation rates is coming from NON-Free/Reduced students. Therefore, the $0.27/meal reimbursement rate for Non-Free/Reduced Students, is woefully inadequate in covering the full cost of this meal.

This is why the Director of Nutrition Svcs indicated that they are using other revenue from cafeteria sales to cover the incremental expense. The problem, of course, is that those cafeteria sales already existed before this program expanded. That revenue is already budgeted. I highly doubt that this board, given the $5 million deficit, agreed to spend an incremental $80k or any amount of dollars on free breakfast for everyone. As to State programs, I am not aware of any State-level programs to pay for NON-Free/Reduced Students breakfast. At this point, the state can't pay for the basic programs its legally obligated to pay without some degree of pro-ration, like General State Aid.

With respect to your comment about the teacher paying for her own breakfast, I sure hope so. We wouldn't want the taxpayer to pick up the cost of breakfast every morning for every teacher, right? And, we certainly wouldn't want the district to inadvertently file a claim with the federal government for reimbursement of a meal that had actually been consumed by a teacher. Would we?