Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 5:29 PM, for 10h 41m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred thirtieth day.
On this day in 1801 (following a tie electoral college vote between Jefferson and Burr), the House of Representatives on the 36th ballot elects Thomas Jefferson as the third president of the United States.
Recommended for reading in full:
Shamane Mills reports Wisconsin Trails Nation In Offering School Breakfasts:
The number of Wisconsin students who received breakfast at school through a federally subsidized nutrition program decreased slightly in the 2017-18 school year. And while about 83 percent of schools in the state participated in the School Breakfast Program, that actually puts Wisconsin near the bottom nationally.
“If a school is not offering the school breakfast program, then children cannot access it,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), which released its School Breakfast Scorecard on Wednesday.
Schools in Wisconsin that don’t offer breakfast for low-income students tell the state Department of Public Instruction they can’t afford to.
“The biggest barrier to providing breakfast is funding,” said DPI spokesman Thomas McCarthy.
On top of federal money, Wisconsin has a school reimbursement rate for free and reduced breakfast of 15 cents a meal. But the state hasn’t paid schools that statutorily set rate since 2006. Because of a shortfall in the account that pays schools for providing breakfast, the reimbursement has fallen to about 7 cents, said McCarthy.
(One would prefer conditions in which no student needed subsidized meals, but we’ve not those conditions, and in any event expenditures of this kind are slight – and far more valuable – as against any number of needless business subsidies or capital projects.)
See also Food Research & Action Center, School Breakfast Scorecard, School Year 2017–2018:
[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/school-breakfast-scorecard-sy-2017-2018.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]Corri Hess reports DNR Considering We Energies Proposal To Increase Mercury Limits Released Into Lake Michigan:
Utility company We Energies wants to increase the amount of mercury it can release into Lake Michigan from its coal-burning power plant in Oak Creek.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources held a public hearing earlier this week to discuss the proposal, drawing more than 100 people opposing the plan.
We Energies spokesman Brendan Conway said the new limits wouldn’t cause a health risk to humans or wildlife.
“We are not asking to be asked to be treated differently than anyone else along the lake,” Conway said. “Other permitees along Lake Michigan have received similar or higher mercury variances. People should also understand this variance we are talking about is allowed by the EPA and the DNR so this is not an imminent public health risk.”
(That’s some spokesman We Energies has – he contends it’s not an imminent health risk. This begs the question of whether it might be an intermediate or long-term risk. The question of dumping mercury isn’t answered sensibly because others dump it, but by an assessment of cumulative effects. Conway offers a mush-for-brains level of reassurance.)