Our schools are supposed to be institutions of learning and personal development. They are places where children can go to grow into adults with the sets of skills needed to compete in today\’s job market, and to lead the kind of innovation that keeps us competitive with the rest of the world in all of the ways that matter most. When students file through those front school doors every day, they are there to gain all of the abilities that the demanding and changing world requires, and it is of the utmost importance that the school itself is able to live up to that expectation through its staff and its policies.

That is a big challenge to accept, because the load of work on students is increasing and advancing all the time. Subjects that were once taught in college are now taught in high school or sooner, and teachers must find a way to work in all of this material into young people\’s lives which are ever more packed and demanding.

With all of these different goals and obstacles swirling around at any given time, with all of these expectations and standards that need to be lived up to, the last thing anyone wants to have to spend any amount of time thinking about is food and nutrition. Yet, that is just what they have to do, because a major controversy at a lot of school is the sale of junk food inside the school, whether its sugary drinks in vending machines, candy bars for sale between classes, or cakes and cookies for sale at lunch time.

The issue of nutrition in school is a hot one these past few years, as rates of obesity and overweight children (and adults) continue to grow all the time. After all, students are a captive audience, since they have to go to school each day and they have to eat while they are there. Food companies work hard to get contracts to have their products sold in schools, and why not? Who would not love to have access to an entire building full of your target audience five days a week for eight hours a day?

For quite a while this was a problem that went unaddressed. Many people just took for granted that schools allowed big food and drink companies to sell sodas, candies, cakes, and cookies to students. However, now that more and more people are waking up to the reality of this problem, something is finally being done about it. Most states have taken an initiative to try to temper the sales of such foods in public schools. Lunch menus now offer a greater variety of healthy choices, like fresh fruits and vegetables, while limiting the availability of less healthy options.

In a free country people should be able to buy and sell what they like, but if children must attend school, it is only natural that the parents of those children should have a say in the types of food being sold to their kids. It seems that things are finally turning in a more positive direction on the issue of quality of nutrition available in schools.

Author Bio: Diana Washington writes for the Test Prep blog Testing Is Easy, a great resource for parents and students who are planning to take standardized tests. She writes on many topics in the realm of education, such as standardized testing, classroom ideas, and SSAT test prep, which is a concern for many parents.

Category: Food and Drinks
Keywords: lunch time,junk food,cafeteria,nutrition,students,high school, education