The real difference will be made from parental support at home. This banning of soft drinks was touted as a major headline in our local community newspaper recently. However, the photo which accompanied the front-page article showed a student eating his lunch brought from home. Looming large in the foreground was a canned soft drink brought WITH his lunch from home. Thus, I don't necessarily expect this demise of soda pop machines to make a huge difference. Makes me wonder if some entrepreneurial students will start selling soda pop off school grounds to make money and keep the "caffeine high" going for students. One student in the article was quoted as saying, "Pop is the only thing that keeps me awake during class!" A sad situation!

Dr. David Chobar,
Associate Professor of Secondary Education
Morningside College
Sioux City, IA 51106

Students only get to purchase snacks and drinks once a week at my school and that is on Fridays and only if you have had good behavior all week. So I don't think this small reward should be taken away from us.

It seems to me that health and nutrition is a bigger problem that cannot be adequately addressed only at school! We have banned soda machines from campus, only to find that parents send their children to school with sodas, sport drinks, and a variety of Starbuck's beverages. We can begin helping through education and setting a good example, but until the people of America make real changes to their behaviors, anything we do at school will be ineffective.

I am the principal at a high school in Maine, we took part in a vending machine project and healthly food plan two years ago. As a result of the project we found students to be less distracted during the school day and there were fewer disruptions due to discipline issues. Yes, there were complaints from students and faculty alike when the soda machines were replaced with water and juice, and the snack machine was lost because we could not find a vendor of healthy snacks. The lunch program also changed its snacks to healthy portions and low fat selections. The population adjusted after awhile and the lunch program did not suffer a loss of sales.

Most schools replace the sodas with artificial fruit juices or other beverages with sugary substitutes which are actually worse for you than the sugar in soda. The big drawback for schools is that vending machines are a big source of revenue to supplement where funds are lacking from the state. We can't very well put fresh fruit in the machines because they will not sell, but other healthy snacks and beverages would be a start.

This is only one place these things are purchased. Only changes in family environment and the value place on health will cause a large change in young people.

I am convinced the attempts to remove high-sugar beverages at school will, at best, have a minimal impact on childhood obesity. Many schools have already banned such sales during the actual school day, yet what positive changes have these measures produced? If one actually calculates the amount of time a given student is actually in the care of a school in any given year between the ages of five and 18, it is only in the range of 14-15% of the time (assuming a seven-hour school day and a 180-day calendar). With the other 85-86% of the time often uncontrolled and easy access to high-sugar beverages, limiting the beverages at school will yield a negligible change in our obesity rate.

Unfortunately, banning soft drinks will hardly make a dent in the childhood obesity problem, because it's what children eat and do the rest of the time that makes the big difference. They will still drink soft drinks after school.
Also - many schools rely on the sale of soft drinks, etc. for money for school functions. This would severely limit that financial support. Soft drinks are prohibited until after lunch in most schools, so that limits the intake.

Year after year, we allow kids to eat junk food at school. I've had lunch duty for years and see students come through the lunch line with pizza, fries, several cookies and a sugary fruit drink. Less and less kids eat a well balanced meal. Couple that with students who do not dress out for Physical Education and lack of parental support and you have a winning combination for obesity and a generation of couch potatoes. I think that only nutritious foods should be served at school with only milk, juice or water as the choices for drinks. Stop allowing food service to sell foods that are popular, but not nutritious. There's plenty of good food out there that kids like and won't contribute to them becomming overweight. Let's stop the nightmare NOW!!

We have banned all sugary, junk food products at our school. We have a grant that provides free fruit and vegetables to everyone at our school. We have changed what is served at lunch and breakfast. This has made a huge change in student behaviour; we have seen students making more healthy food choices. We also have a specialist in the classrooms to talk about good food choices. We will monitor other areas to see if there is improvements that we can relate to the changes in the food allowed on campus.