Listen Now: 
March 02, 2023
Imagine if we spent $74million on free school lunches rather than Truancy Officers?
Martyn Bradbury
Posted On March 2, 2023
The Government have announced an extra $ 74 million on Truancy Officers in an attempt to reel in New Zealand’s disastrous truancy rates.
I am not convinced that is the best use of money.
Many of our children are missing out on school due to the enormous disruption of Covid, many have mental health troubles thanks to that disruption. Many are locked into the economics of food inflation which sees them working and providing for the bills rather than going to school, many are holding on by the thinnest of strands.
Many are having to be parents in homes with broken adults.
If only we could also find another $ 74 million to spend on free breakfasts and free school lunches to counter the poverty pressures rather than just Truancy Officers who coerce attendance.
Rather than seek to resolve the underlying pressures causing Truancy, we simply seek more people to chase Truants.
We are better than this!
We should have the capacity to attempt to solve the problem rather than just cope with the problem which seems to be the constant default position of this country’s social policies.
Our kids deserve a better thought-out policy than simply chasing them down and frog-marching them to school.
This is the sort of social policy I expect from the National, it is not Labour social policy at all.
Martyn Bradbury
Editor – TheDailyBlog.nz
twitter.com/CitizenBomber
RELATED NEWS
