Xie Guoqing: School Lunch Reform Begins with Transparency

As the nutritious school lunch scandal continues to spread and food safety and hygiene issues are frequently reported, what can parents ask education authorities to do besides feeling anxious? Wang Wenhao, a reporter from the Upstream and Downstream News Market, interviews Xie Guoqing, Chairman of the National Alliance of Parents' Associations, who evaluates the current school lunch system from a parent's perspective and offers reform suggestions:

School lunch operations are not transparent, and parents have no way to monitor them

The current Government Procurement Act has major problems that prevent parents from participating in the selection process for campus nutritious lunches. The Public Construction Commission of the Executive Yuan, the competent authority for the Procurement Act, believes that parents are not experts and are not on the recommendation list of the selection committee, so they cannot participate. The problem is that parents pay for campus nutritious lunches but cannot participate in the selection and monitoring. Isn't that strange?

Of course, there have indeed been cases in the past where a parents' association president was himself involved in the group meal or food ingredient procurement business and hoped the school would cooperate a bit, but these are, after all, a minority. The vast majority of parents have no idea how the nutritious lunch fees they pay to the school each semester are actually used.

More than ten years ago, I advocated that schools should disclose to parents the detailed income and expenditure of nutritious lunch fees, so that parents can understand what proportion of the nutritious lunch fees used by schools comes from parents' payments and what proportion comes from government subsidies. How much of this money is used for food ingredient procurement, how much is used for personnel costs, and so on. But to this day, even the most basic disclosure of accounts cannot be implemented by the vast majority of schools. If even the detailed income and expenditure cannot be disclosed, let alone promoting other reforms.

When problems arise with nutritious lunches, the Ministry of Education always habitually says it will strengthen inspections. But inspections do not seem to be the Ministry of Education's expertise. Otherwise, why is it that after inspecting for so long, New Taipei City still had a scandal break out? Why is it that when prosecutors and investigators step in, they find it? The Ministry of Education should carry out cross-ministerial integration. If the business involves the Department of Health, the Council of Agriculture, or prosecutors and investigators, it should ask for help rather than trying to handle everything itself.

Therefore, policy restrictions need to be loosened. If schools contract everything about nutritious lunches to vendors, how can small farmers have the ability to participate?

In addition, the government intends to promote a policy of fully free nutritious lunches. I think it is really unnecessary because it will crowd out other educational resources. For most families, the nutritious lunch fee is actually a very small burden. If the aim is to take care of disadvantaged families who cannot afford nutritious lunch fees, many civil public-interest groups provide subsidies, and funding in this area is very abundant. The government really does not need to promote a policy of fully free nutritious lunches for this reason.

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