Should schools strictly regulate diets?

[Covenant]

Soda is a good example of something that is unjustifiably bad for you, part of a whole behavior pattern that's damaging to kids, and has a whole galaxy of healthy alternatives. I may love my un-diet coke, but diet Cherry Pepsi tastes pretty good.

If kids want to treat it as a dessert then fine, but I doubt most realize they're basically guzzling a snickers bar each time they pop a can open. I'd rate it as more damaging than obviously bad foods like an oreo. I know folks who quit eating snacks but not their softdrinks, and are confused by the problems losing weight. They're similar to those girls at my school who would go on a diet of some variety, and eat a pack of chips or fries for lunch, not realizing they could eat a full meal for the dietary cost of that stuff.

I think a soda ban would be easy to enforce and justify, as well as pretty fair to the students. It isn't hard to tell a kid to dump it out and fill it up with water from the drinking fountain. You could even allow kids to have waterbottles in class as a further element of positive peer pressure. Thirsty kids would buckle eventually I bet, and start drinking water instead and bringing refillable water bottles just to make use of the ease of it.

[RedImperator]

Here's the problem with that: if you're not going to be serious about enforcement, then it becomes one more rule the kids know is basically a joke.

With all due respect, in high school I am convinced that most high school students feel that most of the rules are a joke.

In a badly run high school, they do, but in that situation you have bigger problems than junk food. It all comes down to effective enforcement: if the administration follows through on its threats and backs up the teachers (when you bust a kid for breaking the rules and he comes back fifteen minutes later smirking because the vice principal did nothing to him, it's a toss up whether you want to punch the kid or the principal more), the rules are respected. The problem is that it takes time and effort to effectively enforce rules, which is why I don't believe in making them unless they're necessary and the benefit gained is substantial.

Even forcing the students to hide such foods from the lunch monitors would be an improvement, in the sense that the kids aren't openly confronted with other kids' junk food all day long. You don't know what it's like when your kid asks why the other kids have all kinds of food that your kids are not allowed to have. Do you have to tell them that all of their friends are idiots? Is that really a good thing to do? If the other kids have to hide it, at least they're not shoving it in your kid's face, or telling your kid that his mom packs a crappy lunch because she never lets him have <insert junk food name here>.

Hiding it from the adults isn't the same as hiding it from the other kids. It's not as in your face, but kids aren't stupid and they're usually a lot more aware of what other kids are doing than adults are. I can see where you're coming from, but I don't know if the effect is worth the cost.

Personally, I always thought that openly flaunting rules tends to weaken the authority of the school. If kids are sneaking junk food around, that doesn't really have the same effect.

I have to disagree here. Openly flaunting the rules is usually worse (I think if a school tacitly admits it's not going to bother enforcing one particular rule, that's less damaging than trying and failing to enforce it), but breaking the rules still shows the kids they can get away shit. From my perspective as someone who's worked in schools where keeping weapons and drugs out is a major issue, it's especially troubling to show the kids the school can't keep banned products out of the building.

That's the thing; if you think you have to ensure that each kid gets the perfect diet, that's pretty much impossible. But cutting out certain well-known poisons would be pretty easy.

I think you and I are basically in agreement here and are just quibbling about the details. I'm all for clearing junk out of the vending machines and offering low cost, healthy food in the cafeteria, and banning particular junk foods like soda where you can get good results for a small cost (especially if there are bonus effects like avoiding disgusting messes and keeping kids from wiring themselves up with caffeine).

Kids that age are accustomed to a lot more teacher oversight. High-school kids are a particularly vexing disciplinary problem because they labour under the delusion that they are full-fledged responsible mature adults, and should be treated accordingly. You don't hear elementary schoolkids whining about their "rights" whenever a teacher tells them to do something they don't want to do, but you can't shut up a high-schooler when he gets going about his "rights". It's like "rights" are a new toy that they pick up around the age of 15, and they're so excited that they can't stop talking about them or expecting everyone else to be impressed by them.

I've heard more than my share of rights talk, and it's irritating, but there are other things going on, too. Teenagers by nature are going to test boundaries that little kids, I think, accept as ironclad. They'll cry about their rights as a method of pushing those boundaries, or to try to escape punishment when the boundaries push back, but a lot of it comes off to me as just "How much can I get away with?" It's part of the transition to adulthood and it's something everyone who works with them has to deal with--they're always testing you, even the good ones.

[Uraniun235]

For some schools it would be logistically impossible to try and even half-heartedly enforce a no-junk-food ban at lunch; supervision becomes extremely difficult when the cafeteria is so badly overcapacity that the students spill out into the parking lot and the hallways just for a place to sit to eat their lunch.

If a school has the resources to pull it off... sure, cool, whatever. I suspect, however, that a great many schools across the US simply have much more pressing issues to address than taking away Timmy's ho-hos.

[wilfulton]

By the same logic, schools shouldn't attempt to stop kids from smoking either, since you can't stop them from lighting up as soon as they get home, and as long as they did it outside in a properly designated smoking area on breaks (like teachers have to), the academic, safety, aesthetic, and non-smokers' helath impact of smoking is negligible. There are reasons why a food code isn't a good idea, but "they'll just pig out at home anyway" isn't one of them.

I'm mostly thinking the cost benefit analysis here. But now that you mention it, it does seem like shaky ground.

This is the second fucking time in this thread you've made a broad, insulting, utterly unjustified generalization about teachers. Would you care to justify them, or, failing that, retract them? Or should I just classify you as a worthless ignorant twat and treat you accordingly from now on?

You evidently haven't been to my elementary or junior high schools. Most of those teachers would fit the description. Those that don't can only control their own sphere of influence, which isn't very big, and would not be effective.
My opinion of my teachers was formulated by my experience with them. I did go to school remember. However, I can see that in a hotheaded moment I perhaps erred by shotgun blasting every teacher, both those on whom the shoe fits and those on whom it does not. I retract my statement.

Why do you and Covenant think that it's necessary to enforce some sort of complete ironclad lockdown? I'm just talking about having the lunchroom monitors seize obvious junk food. It's not a big deal, it wouldn't take any extra personnel or cost any extra money to enforce, and yes, it wouldn't be 100% effective or single-handedly solve the obesity problem. So what? it's still not a bad idea; you only make it a bad idea by pretending that it has to be some sort of perfect shield, thus exaggerating the difficulty of it. We're not talking about nuclear missile defense here, for fuck's sake. It's not a gigantic disaster if some warheads get through. And if lunchroom monitors can break up people arguing or being rude, it's hardly a huge imposition upon them to say "hey, no soda".

Heh, put that way it really doesn't seem like a bad idea. But I do know from experience that things often look easier on paper than they end up being in real life. If your goal is to just reduce the amount of junk food being consumed in school, then simply saying "no soda" would probably work (and of course, be prepared to defend yourself against the "WHY NOT!?" protests of all your pretentious kids )