Glad you understand.
That is the way I read the article myself, I never said they could not bring in junk food.
You are advocating the healthy lunch program, but may not believe in the integrity of it by supplying unhealthy items to an entire class of students.
roguenuke "I provided a good amount of snacks for my son's class last year, including cookies, cupcakes, juice, candy, and other things".
Are you contributing to childhood obesity by providing sugary treats for students? Do the other parents know you are giving their children sugary treats?
It's a good thing until schools start losing money because the food isn't selling and goes to waste. Vendors will not want to stock the machines without a profit. Have you ever stood at a vending machine, having many items purchased but see those lonely apples, carrots sticks, pears screaming for someone to buy them.
Yes, this is happening and that is why we have -
"Nationwide, student participation in the National School Lunch Program
declined by 1.2 million students (or 3.7 percent) from school year 2010-2011 through school year 2012-2013,
after having increased steadily for many years. This decrease was driven primarily by a decline of 1.6 million students eating school lunch who pay full price for meals"
U.S. GAO - School Lunch: Implementing Nutrition Changes Was Challenging and Clarification of Oversight Requirements Is Needed
And more schools opting out of the lunch program again this year.
There are ways to apply a new program, pushing it quickly onto the schools certainly could have been done differently or at a slower pace. We know schools have scarified in many ways to keep the doors open, adding new lunch guidelines added cost to many school budgets. We also have no evidence the funds received by the schools from the federal program are going back into feeding the children.
Hmmm, find ways to make them more hungry? Sure, have several lunch periods and the student can select one each day when they are hungry. Makes things much more difficult for the teacher adjusting the lunch schedule around the student hunger pains makes no sense, so how would you get an entire room full of children hungry at the same time?
Schools have wasted much needed money on this program, student are dropping out at an accelerated speed, food is being wasted as reported by the government, schools are opting out - all for what? Many schools had salad bars, healthy items along side their regular menu, food choices for all.