Courtesy of FOX13NOW.com:
KAYSVILLE — Davis High School has been fined $15,000 after they were caught selling soda pop during lunch hour, which is a violation of federal law.
The federally mandated law prohibits the sale of carbonated beverages after lunch is served. The program is an effort to help fight childhood obesity and to have young students make better food choices.
Had no idea this was a federal law now, but, hey… at least this makes it impossible for the kids to buy soda at the school, which was the intent all along, right?
Sucker….
“Before lunch you can come and buy a carbonated beverage. You can take it into the cafeteria and eat your lunch, but you can’t first go buy school lunch then come out in the hallway and buy a drink,” said Davis High Principal Dee Burton.
Principal Burton said he does not understand the law with rules that seem to be contradictory.
“We can sell a Snickers bar, but can’t sell licorice. We can’t sell Swedish Fish, we can’t sell Starburst, we can’t sell Skittles, but we can sell ice cream, we can sell the Snickers bar, Milky Ways, all that stuff,” said Burton.
Sooooo, the machines are still there, but you just have to reconfigure in which order you buy your lunch and your soda? They sell some candy, but not other kinds of candy? And this made sense…to WHOM, exactly? How does this law help anything?
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Personally, I was never a fan of the soda machines in schools. Kids are there to learn, and they really don’t need Zingers and a Mountain Dew to do so. If kids want snacks, and are being asked to pay for them anyway, they can bring them to school themselves. Personal responsibility and all that….
And if you’re wondering why the schools DON’T just get rid of the machines, the answer is simple. As Joe Biden might say, it’s a four-letter word: M-O-N-E-Y.
Schools sign big, multi-year contracts with snack vendors and drink companies, which can bring in thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of dollars to a school and/or school district. Thus, the conflict between the incessantly droning “snacks are bad” rhetoric and the hypocrisy in keeping the machines on site. It results in the liberal illogic of making the kids alter their route in order to get their sodas, and yet the food police in the schools will still be able to perform their public hand-wringing about the evils of sodas & snacks, ……..all the while continuing to receive $$$$$ from their machines which sell sodas and snacks.
So, what to do? Do we ban the sodas from schools? Do we basically do to Coke and Pepsi what we’ve already done to Joe Camel?
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Honestly, I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem is that schools feel the need to pimp themselves out to whatever will bring in more cash, so they can afford to do all the programs that need funding: sports, band, etc.,…
Much as our federal spending has ballooned out of control, so too has our spending on education. We now spend about 5x more per child for public school education than we did back in the early 1960s, and I dare someone to tell me that we are putting out a better educated student. We’re spending over $10,000/child, but how much of it is football, and baseball, and band, or even the 14th edition English book, when the 13th edition was just dandy, thank you? Lord knows that I loved music and sports, and the newest books, and everything else. But when you end up having to try to contort your logic to simultaneously vilify & allow sodas on campus, all because the schools need the money so badly to pay for all these promises that you couldn’t otherwise afford, perhaps you’ve lost sight of your priorities just a wee bit.
It is the same trap where we find our nation today with federal entitlement spending. No one wants to cut anything, since it’s all wonderfully important, and so much of what we do is “good”, and people really like it, and …..oh, spare me. WE. ARE. BROKE. Maybe it’s time to scale things back a bit, eh? And maybe concentrate on getting the economy going again? Hmmm?
Here’s a little something that I would ask the big-brained folks in charge to try to keep in mind when they are spending our tax dollars:
**More government is not Better government, and More spending on education doesn’t mean a Better Education.**
Class dismissed.
Two Heads are Better Than One 