Yesterday I posted about a teacher in my child’s middle school who routinely distributes 12 oz cans of Coke and large bags of gummi bears (and sometimes both) to his students as rewards for classroom performance. I also recounted how, when my daughter asked this teacher for permission to go to the water fountain, he instead just turned to his mini-fridge and handed her a can of Coke.
Later my daughter read the post (I’d published it while she was at school yesterday) and told me I’d actually underplayed what was goes on in that classroom. Apparently there was another incident in which this same teacher distributed Popsicles and cups of Häagen-Dazs – and tried to push three of them onto my daughter, who politely declined after just one. And she told me kids sometimes received more than one can of Coke per class period.
While I was reeling from that news, my son came home from his elementary school, the very same elementary school I actually lauded in yesterday’s post for cutting back on classroom candy rewards.
Well, apparently my son had won some sort of competition and the school presented him with this:
In case you can’t tell from the photo, that’s the jumbo-sized Hershey bar, which comprises four servings. If my child had eaten this bar at school (which he could easily have done, since I knew nothing about it), he would have consumed 800 calories, 88 grams of sugar, and 48 grams of fat, 28 of which are saturated.
But wait, there’s more.
Yesterday was a standardized testing day in Houston ISD, so the school (without mentioning this plan to parents) also provided my son and the rest of the students with this — as “snack:”
And because someone, somewhere once determined that peppermint keeps kids alert during tests, our school also routinely provides kids with these on testing days:
People, I’m really ready to scream.
I’ve talked about these issues on The Lunch Tray so often over the past two years I’m getting blue in the face. Maybe this time around a simple bullet point list would suffice.
Copy it, share it, nail it to your school’s front door.
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