It's about time, school soda sales to end

http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2006/05/03/383065.html

Bravo!

I remember when I first became aware that they were selling soda to kids in school. I was pretty shocked actually. Then I was told by one of my best friend's teenaged son that they were allowed to have soda, candy, and potato chips at their desks in his school, which is friggin' outrageous. Another sign of a permissive society doing itself in.

Learn to say "no" to your kids again America.

Surely "learn how to say no to your corporations"?

That too, which can be done by proxy - by saying "no" to your kids. (figurative "your"

I remember when getting soda was considered a treat - now many kids wake up and have some for breakfast...

I also remember when McDonald's was considered a MAJOR treat - now I have friends who shovel that crap to their kids several times a week.

Maybe I'm jaded because I'm a college student, and went to a pretty "mature" highschool (private school), but I don't 'get it'. While eating is generally considered rude while the professor is lecturing, or the teacher back in highschool, it was just accepted that almost everyone would have something to drink... water, juice, soda, whatever. I don't see the big deal. And so far as the health issues... that's the buisness of the people who drink it, in my opinion.

I can understand maybe in elementry school... Kids get hyper too easy from sugar. But beyond that? Waste of legislation, IMO.

I think it's in the best interests of schools to promote health - at least during school hours Rei. It's why Phy Ed class exists - sports too, to an extent.

College aged people are adults, whereas the others aren't. It's also just another uneccessary distraction - you wanna drink soda and fill your face with chips in college which you're paying for? All well and good. But when it's a 100% publically funded venue like public schools, the public has a vested interest, and I am glad this was reversed.

Shouldn't the parents be the ones to say "No" to their kids? I don't like that big brother is deciding what should and shouldn't be in a school lunch box. If you blithly hand your kid 5$ for lunch every day, don't be too surprised when that money goes into corndogs, pop and chips, resulting in larger pants being needed.

Teach your children to make healthy choices, monitor their eating habits...

I do rather like a system that's been tested in some areas where parents can program what their children can buy from a cafeteria (so you can set it so they can get one pop, or chips, or one cookie, or only one a week, and they have to learn to make choices and ration)

As for eating in class, in my schools we weren't allowed to do it until grade 12 or 13, and then it was just drinks allowed. Why on earth are you eating in class if you have a set lunch hour though? I eat in my Uni classes, but only because I often have chunks of 6 to 8 hours together with only long enough breaks to run to the next class.

See, now we're getting in to a much deeper topic, but. Sports should be an elective, IMO. That aside, reasonable consumption of soda can be perfectly healthy, particularly if combined with exercise and so forth.

But as far as a distraction goes... My view is it's better for students to be able to get a drink when they want it, rather than be distracted by wanting to be able to get a drink. As someone who has sat in a chair doing both, I know which is more condusive to ME learning.

I'm not saying I think students should be eating lunch while in class, but having a bottle of soda or juice or something? That's not an issue, for me.

Sports shouldd be elective, but Physical Education should not. Way back when I went to HS, this meant either participating in the P part of the PE or, alternatively, taking the semester to produce a mini-thesis on an approved topic related to health and/or fitness.

I agree that reasonable consumption is OK, but I don't really care if they don't feel like selling Coke in the schools. Additionally, it appears they are ceasing sales in elementary and middle schools, not HS. Who the hell thought selling pop to elementary school kids was a good idea anyway?

What happens if you bring your own Mountain Dew? Is that like having a controlled substance? Will they confiscate it? Will they get expelled like the poor suckers that bring aspirin or Midol to school?

Totally agree with you on that Rei. I'm a senior right now and I go to a technical (vocational) school as well as a private school, so I got to a private *and* public school. In the private school we are not allowed to have drinks or anything in class, but in the public school we are. There haven't been any problems all year so I don't see what the big deal is.

They're not saying what can and can't be in the lunchbox. They can have soda at lunch. Kids usually get an allowance. How is a parent to stop them from spending it at a vending machine between classes at school? By pressuring the schools to not be enablers.

The rest I agree with (especially the part I bolded), and probably because of how I was raised. It was not at all the norm when I was growing up that I got cash from my parents for lunch, nor was it for 95% of the other kids I knew. My parents could have certainly afforded to hand me a few bucks a day - but - they didn't, and that is a BIG part of the issue. It's so much easier to just hand them the money than to argue with them - lazy parenting, and extremely short-sighted in my opinion, because those kids will pass on those "qualities" to their own kids. Either I brought a lunch from home, or I got the 5 bucks every two weeks to buy a school hot lunch punch card, which was good for ten lunches. (yes I realize that would cost more these days).

If a school doesn't want to sell it, that's fine. If it becomes legislated that it cannot be sold, that's less fine. One is elective, the other is not.

As an interesting related aside, I earned a lot of pocket money in highschool selling soda. The only drink you could buy in our school was milk. We didn't even have a lunch program, it was strictly bag-lunches. Seniors could leave campus during lunch if they wanted, nobody else could. So there was quite a market for *stuff*. Me and my best friend started planning trips to Sam's Club weekly. We would buy cases of soda, candy (for between classes), ramen, etc. After a while, we branched out... We started aranging pizza days, for example, where we would take orders for pizza by the slice, and then call in a big order a couple class periods before lunch. We made a pretty big profit off that, too. Even the teachers were buying from us, this wasn't "black market".

We weren't charging alot over cost, but we did charge enough... It worked out to about a hundred a month profit for each of us. The best part (IMO!) was that as the sole employers, "product shrink" was on our heads... But we were making enough profit we didn't care. We could have pizza/soda/whatever whenever we felt like it. It was like the other students were paying us to have the stuff.

I'm sure I probably broke a few laws technicly, reselling food or whatever, but... *shrug*.

Denying the option means they'll sneak it like they did for a decade before the first soda machien appeared in a school.

Parents need to educate their kids and raise them to make wise choices when presented with unwise ones. This isn't saying "no", it's dumbing-down things and giving kids permission to be imbeciles.

Still, it does get out of hand. When I was in HS, I remember Surge being invented. So much caffeine it was literally addictive. So what does the Coca Cola company do? They pay school systems to let them bring a vendor in who pushes a cart full of free ones. Kids load up on the stuff, are jittery in classes and can't sit still, are literally bouncing themselves off of lockers down the hallways, etc. Eventually parents complain about the behavior issues and the cost of getting their kids Surge at home, there's an investigation, and the recipe for Surge is found to have so many addictive properties that the drink is banned from the market.

To this day, a decade later, I still want a Surge. What does that tell you?

Is THAT the story? Fuck, I loved the stuff. I still have a couple bottles in the fridge at my parents folks, stuck in the back. I should crack one open and see if it's still any good.

That was my understanding of what happened.

HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE SOME?

Will send L$ and a shipping address for that shit, man.

Sports are, but they are encouraged and offered. As for phy ed, I would HATE to see that go, because it is what gets some kids interested in physical fitness.

I guess in my schools, we weren't allowed to go get a drink during class unless we were choking or something. I agree with that policy - it is disruptive to allow kids their whims during learning time. Not to mention, you let one do it, then they all wanna do it, and they will find all sorts of ways to dilly-dally along the way back to turn that trip to the water fountain into a 10 minute affair. The only times we were allowed to leave the room was to use the restroom (and you couldn't abuse that - if you asked to many times you were sent to the nurse to explain why), to go to a pre-approved appointment - like the doctor's office or the dentist, or to go see the principle, if we were say... drinking soda or having snacks in class.

Heck, we weren't even allowed chewing gum. Educating children is serious business, and the US has gone from the front of the pack to the rear in the past couple decades. We don't need sanctioned distractions, in classrooms that are paid for by all our taxes. If private schools want to have different rules, that's fine, they're private.

For me it is, because I see it as a distraction. If a kid stops to dig out a drink from their bookbag they may miss something important. They may divert the attention of other kids or the teacher while doing so. Having someting to drink at our sides at all moments is a luxury of the past decade or so. It is not a necessity, and certainly not in schools. We made it 200 years without such distractions, and I don't see why we need to allow it now. Kids are fat. Kids are behind the rest of the world educationally. The more distractions we can remove, the better. It isn't gonna kill them to wait until lunch or until they get home to have that juice or soda.

High schools can get diet sodas, by the way. (What is the age band for high schools in the US?)

Did a quick delve into wikipedia... apparently that's an urban rumor, it was just decided that it didn't sell well enough. You can still get it in Norway, where it's called URGE. I might have to look into importing something.

And no! My surge!

Depending on how far ahead/behind the curve you are, anywhere from 12-20 :/

A lot of the Coca-Cola in schools is motivated by cash kickbacks to the schools.

Here, let us actively market to kids with no direct supervision, get em hooked on a not so wonderful addictive drug, load em with corn syrup, and you can get some cash and we may even give you a scoreboard/billboard for your athletic field. Ick.

It reminds me of a Channel One (compulsory TV in classrooms with advertisements) who had an advertisement in Advertising Age which said something to the effect of "What else can give you the undivided attention of N million teens for 12 minutes a day"

Never let a marketing opportunity go to waste. I've found that teaching my child "why is company X advertising to you, for you or for them?" to be a very poignant socratic lesson, as she is far more skeptical of the incessant barrage of "Buy this Crap to be Happy" messages.

All of which can be handled through ordinary discipline... student is too disruptive/not paying attention, etc.



That doesn't make it a bad thing.



No, but it's not a bad thing, either.



That's a logical falacy, Nolan, and you know it. We made it 200 years without a lot of other things, too.



All of which are attacking stuff that isn't the root of the problem. It's just as dumb as trying to combat obesity by printing nutritional labels on McDonalds, but has the added downside of being very BigBrothery to boot. The solution is getting people to stop over-indulging in junk, certainly, but not by simply outlawing it.

Corvus and Reisuki, you wouldn't have gotten away with it in the school system I attended, nor would you have probably in most public school systems of that era. (the 70s, 80s and the preceding decades)

I can speak for my high school when I say that you would have been disciplined, and more severely each time. Eventually you would have been expelled. Tough rules? Yes, but back then, the US was among the top of of the crop from an educational standpoint. It is my firm belief that the lax, permissive society we've become is exactly why so many kids can't handle basic mathematics and vocabulary when exiting High School these days.

I am just going to disagree. I think it is a bad thing. It's not "outlawing". It's a step toward returning things to the way they were when they worked. No, soda in class is not the root of all the problems, but it is one facet, and I will take any progress.

When I made the 200 years comment, it was about schools, and schools alone, therefore I don't think it's fallacious at all. Something has changed in the past 10 to 15 years with regard to education, there's no denying that.

Watch me not care what would have gotten me expelled. I didn't go to school where you did, or when you did. Catholic schools are in the news now for things like expelling students who get pregnant - doesn't mean I give a damn about that either.

I agree that an overly lax society is a bad thing. But I don't think it's the schools job to fix that. It should begin and end at home, not in a public brainwashing facility.

There is the difference between you and I - I've come to fucking HATE bullshit "feelgood" solutions. Fix it right, or don't bother. Soda is NOT the problem, it's not even on the top ten list of problems (My highschool has a fantastic record in post-highschool results of it's students). Fix student "empowerment". Fix "no wrong answer" policies. Fix revisionist math and history and geography. Fix teacher hiring practices. Fix bullshit "teach to the test" education plans. Fix any number of things, but FIX SOMETHING USEFUL.

This type of crap takes time that could be fixing real problems, and at the same time placates people who are calling for changes, "But, see! We're changing! We've banned teh sodaz!"



My response was about schools as well.

US high schools will range from 9th-12th year of school to 11-12th year mostly dictated by local demographics and buildings. Thus a high-schooler could be between 15 and 19 years old (give or take).

Unfortunately, it seems pretty clear that aspartame does have drug effects although it is widely debated how significant they are. Personally, I was a pretty big consumer of Diet Coke until I noticed that it tended to make me unduly hungry (and, yes, I know my single experience means essentially nothing).