In the recent FY ’11 Budget promulgated by Gov. Chris Christie, the nonpublic school community learned that nonpublic school students will lose the entire state aid portion of their school lunch program. This amounts to a 5 percent cut in the entire program amounting to $439,000 statewide.
Dr. George Corwell, director of education for the New Jersey Catholic Conference, commented on the proposed cut: “We believe that this may be an oversight in the budget because certainly qualified nonpublic school students are no less worthy to receive the benefits of the school lunch program than are their public school counterparts.”
The New Jersey Catholic Conference and the New Jersey Network of Catholic School Families has issued an Action Alert for parents, administrators, teachers, and other interested parties supportive of nonpublic education to contact the members of the Senate Budget & Appropriations Committee and the Assembly Appropriations Committee in order to ask that they restore these funds in order to establish parity between the programs for public and nonpublic school students.
The alert can be found at http://www.capwiz.com/njcathconf/home/
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