While a lot of suggestions coming in to this email will be focused on rebuilding, I would like to suggest that we look at our current school meals program. I think this is an excellent initiative to ensure that students gets a meal however my concern is around the summer holidays, while these kids are out of school,  parents have difficulty providing meals for the children. And even if they are able to provide many of the times they give the children a few dollars to go to the village shop and purchase a snack. I am not an expert but I volunteer in the St. John community and it is evident that most of the times the children are left sometimes with a few dollars (if any)to find lunch. 

How can we rectify this? One of the ideas I was considering is we can possibly work with the representative in the community and the teachers of the various school to identify the children in need and set up the mechanism to ensure they are able to access at least one meal a day. Let us make sure that none of our children go hungry, I am sure there are many other ideas that can be considered such as working with the private sector to ensure that "no child go hungry". Set up a foundation to monitor and control. We need to ensure our children are taking care of and through this program we can identify the ones in need and along with the welfare department work to ensure they are able to improve their current status and move out of the program. 

I do hope some consideration is given to my contribution.

Kindest Regards

Alesia

The school meals department should be used. The workers could be  work I g for only a 4 week stint. Cooks,  drivers and servers. Radically they are paid for nine weeks when the schools are closed for 9/10 weeks.

The campers could be asked to pay$5.00 a week.

I think school children should also pay $5.00 per week for  school meals from September also

Submitted by Priscilla Millar

My concern is the quality of the food which is served to our children.  The food is just mainly starch and too much bread, no vegetables.  and hardly any protein.  So it is common to see cheesy macaroni only on a given day or a ham cutter which is a massive bread and a very thin slice of ham.  Starting September 2018, the Ministry of Education had said that for at least two days a week, Water Wednesday and Fruit Friday, healthy fruit and water will be encouraged in school.  The new School Meals Plan also proposed there was an effort to include fruit like apples, pears, melon and bananas, as well as vegetables like carrots, lettuce, and corn on the new meal plan.  I have seen melon, apples and bananas.  So far the menu has been a far cry from supplying children with a nutritious meal, especially when that may be the only healthy meal the child receives for the day.  I know the teachers generally encourage the children to eat the fruit and drink more water.  Can the School meals department look at supplying more nutritious meals?  If there a budget constraints, say that and propose and increase but if you continue to feed our children with crap, crap is all they will know.