It's how bureaucrats and public workers treat their customers because there is no accountability. Think anyone will be fired? Not likely.

Lunch Commissars On The March In Utah

Education: What does it take to turn an ordinary school official into a red-star commissar remorselessly yanking lunches from hungry kids and tossing them in the trash? Try an anti-school choice union and a big bureaucracy.

It actually happened at Uintah Elementary School in the Salt Lake City school district. The story from the embattled school administrators is that a "child nutrition manager" sought to correct the arrears of parents' payments to their subsidized lunch program ($2.50 a day) and, after giving a day's notice, had food service workers yank the trays of served food right out of the children's little hands as they were about to eat.

The justification? Mommy and Daddy hadn't paid up.

Now the district is red-faced as public outrage mounts and Democratic congressmen call for more cash for school lunches.

But it was never really about money, or even fiscal discipline: The food was thrown out in front of the children and the nutrition manager mandated that they be handed less-than-balanced meals of milk and fruit instead.

So rather than bill 50 parents for $100 of unpaid lunches to recover the money, the "nutrition manager" decided the taxpayers would pay instead.

The whole travesty was about neither money nor nutrition. No, it was a commissariat's lunge for power. In his new book, "The New School," blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds explains how unaccountable public education bureaucrats are triggering a move toward more customer-friendly schools.

Reynolds notes that the growth of bureaucrats is part of the problem. In the case of the Salt Lake City school district, it has 5,026 employees and a $244 million budget, with 291 people making six-figure salaries while another 1,058 earn more than $75,000.

These include teachers' aides, administrators II, journeyman carpenters, and after-school coordinators, according to utahsright.com.

What's more, the district's educators, bureaucrats and administrators are represented by the Utah Education Association union. Not surprisingly, it shoveled out $3 million in 2007 to defeat a school voucher proposal in a bid to preserve its monopoly on education.

It's an unaccountable, bureaucratic mess. In an atmosphere like this, does it surprise anyone that lunch commissars would seem perfectly confident in bullying and humiliating small children just to flex their own power?