Former Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn has slammed Government’s offering of school meals to needy children during the summer vacation, suggesting that the Mia Mottley-led administration should instead be distributing supermarket vouchers to their families.Chief among his objections to the Summer Nutrition Programme is that children would have to experience the indignity of going to various locations to queue for food and be exposed to ridicule.“That has me so angry it ain’t funny. I pray about not losing my cool over that. You have a situation where you have needy children; God knows I needy myself but I ain’t lining up in no place for nobody to see me going in there with my hand out begging for food,” Franklyn argued.“Those days are gone. In the Prime Minister’s grandfather’s time, it served that purpose to get him elected and to make him popular. It should not be serving that purpose now. . . You have to treat people with dignity and the dignity of this whole thing is not putting young children to go and line up and let people pass and see them and say ‘look, Caswell children out there in the line’,” he said during an interview with Barbados TODAY.
