It’s a sad day when parents can’t cook food for their own children.

Last night at Henry Hudson Elementary, I presided over the death of a hot lunch program provided by the parents of Hudson since the end of World War II.

The meeting was our regular monthly PAC (Parent Advisory Council) meeting and the week before the PAC Executive had been made aware of the new improved regulations. See http://www.hudsonpac.ca/lunch-fundraiser-issues-and-concerns/ for details.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the kitchen facilities (which are good for the day care that operates in the school starting at 3:01 PM) are not good enough for a Food Safe certified group of parents to prepare and serve food (which met nutritional guidelines) at lunch. Were the upgrades to the facilities to be done, the cost would render the program non-viable.

So there’s the potential to kiss about $25,000 per annum of fundraising goodbye. No other fundraising activity had the features of being widely used, revenue positive, popular with the children and community building.

So, we will soon send the children off to a seismically unsafe building, with bathrooms that are horrible (Next year the plan is to have 80 kindergarten kids and 2 stalls; I hope they buy more mops.)

But, thank God, they’ll be no chance for them to be poisoned at lunch time by their own parents.

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Robert Ford is PAC Chair at Hudson Elementary. This blog post represents his own views and is not to be mistaken for anything but his own expression.