Milk policy failures
At the beginning of this academic year, the government launched its policy to offer free milk to all school-age children nationwide. For three months, the well-intentioned policy’s implementation led to criticism and protest from elementary school teachers, parents and suppliers, while causing a number of new problems.
The major problem lies in the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA) decision to use “bidding” to keep the costs down. Suppliers only deliver milk to each school as a whole, not to each class of a school. However, has the ministry considered the issue of what comes next after a large amount of milk is delivered to each school? Who would be responsible for counting and distributing the milk on the spot when it arrives? Schools with a few hundred students might be able to handle this. However, for schools with 1,000 students or more, who is willing to carry such a burden?
I am an elementary school teacher personally responsible for this duty at my school. The authorities in charge first conducted a survey on this policy in June, asking whether schools wanted to order fresh milk or sterilized “long-life milk.” Of course, most of the schools chose to order long-life milk that is much easier to preserve.
To reduce the weekly workload, most schools would rather distribute several boxes of milk to students at once, so they can carry them home. As a result, the order of long-life milk is far larger than that of fresh milk across Taiwan, and many schools were still waiting to order long-life milk as of last month. When parents question schools’ choice of long-life milk over fresh milk, schools often cite poor refrigeration preservation and food safety problems as excuses. Who should be responsible for this?
The Ministry of Education (MOE) supports this policy because the MOA is paying for it. The incompetent MOE only needs to issue a document and elementary school students can have milk to drink, so why not? After all, while teachers nationwide are busy serving concurrently as calculators and delivery clerks on the spot, top officials in the MOE do not need to do anything themselves. Since they would be praised for helping students absorb calcium and thus become “smarter and stronger” through drinking milk, MOE authorities naturally raised their hands in favor.
The fact is that some suppliers of school lunches also provide fresh milk, as boxes of milk are well distributed on lunch shelves according to the number of students in each class. So students can easily grab milk by themselves during breaks or lunch hours, and teachers can even guide them on how to clean and recycle the boxes for the sake of environmental protection. If the MOA simply allocated funds to each school based on the market price of fresh milk, and each school wrote off such funds as its usual school lunch expenses, there would not be so many issues.
It has already been three months since the policy’s implementation. Do the unconscionable MOA and the incompetent MOE still not know what the problem is by now?
Previously, the authorities’ proposal to allow students with lactose intolerance to order soybean milk instead of regular milk was also chaotic, and those students have still not been able to order it. Is it that difficult? Just ask teachers or dietitians working in education and you have the answer.
Hsiao Ma
Taipei
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