Xie Guoqing: Nutritional lunch, starting with transparent reform

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With the prolonged burning of nutritious lunch cases and the frequent spread of food safety and health issues, apart from panic, what can parents ask the educational administration to do? Upstream and downstream news bazaar reporter Wang Wenhao gives you an exclusive interview with Xie Guoqing, chairman of the National Federation of parents' groups, to express whether or not the current nutritious lunch system is in place from the parents' point of view, and to put forward suggestions for reform:

The operation of nutritious lunch is opaque and parents can't supervise it.

There is a big problem with the current government procurement law, which makes it impossible for parents to participate in the selection process of campus nutritious lunch. The Public works Committee of the Executive Yuan, which is in charge of the procurement law, believes that parents are not experts and are not on the list recommended by the selection committee, so they cannot participate. The problem is that the parents pay for the nutritious lunch on campus, but they cannot participate in the selection and supervision. Isn't that strange?

Of course, in the past, there have been parents who are engaged in the industry of group meals or food procurement. I hope that schools can help us with this, but this is after all a minority. Most parents do not know how to use the nutrition lunch fee paid to the school each semester.

More than a decade ago, I advocated that it was necessary for schools to disclose the income and expenditure details of nutrition lunch expenses to parents, so that parents could understand the proportion of nutrition lunch expenses paid by parents and subsidized by the government. How much of this money is spent on food procurement, how much money is spent on staff costs, and so on. But today, even the most basic accounts are made public, and most schools are unable to implement them. We cannot even disclose the details of revenue and expenditure, let alone promote other reforms.

In the face of problems with nutritious lunches, the Ministry of Education is used to saying that it will step up checks. However, checking does not seem to be the specialty of the Ministry of Education, otherwise why does it take so long to check that corruption cases still break out in New Taipei City? Why did you find out when you checked it out? The Ministry of Education should do inter-ministerial integration, and if the business involves the Department of Health, the Council of Agriculture or the procuratorate, it should ask for help, rather than want to do it all.

Therefore, policy restrictions need to be relaxed. If the school gives all the nutritious lunch to the manufacturers, how can small farmers be able to participate?.

In addition, the Government intends to promote a comprehensive free nutritious lunch policy. I do not think it is really necessary because it will crowd out other educational resources. The cost of nutritious lunches is in fact a very small burden on most families. if they are unable to pay for nutritious lunches in order to take care of disadvantaged families, many non-governmental public welfare organizations have subsidized them. There is really no need for the Government to promote a comprehensive free policy for nutritious lunches for this purpose.

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