The Indy Star’s Kevin Corcoran and Michele McNeil have an article entitled: GOP school-aid plan may boost class size. Under the proposed plan, average per-pupil spending would shrink from $6,006 this year to $5,987 by 2007. The actual amount varies from school to school, but it doesn’t sound like any school would avoid belt-tightening.
This plays into thoughts I had while watching a movie over the weekend. I watched the documentary “Super-Size Me” which is a documentary that has more to do with Americans’ general health and diet than with schools specifically. But, there is a segment where the filmmaker looks at school diets and notes the problem with soda machines in the schools. The usual justification for having these machines around is that the soda vendors then give a fair amount of money to the schools. It just seems a shame to me that we have to expose our kids to marketing and get them even more pumped full of sugar to get a few extra bucks for extra-curricular activities. The soda companies get their money from the kids pumping coins into the machine which the kids in turn got from their parents. Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to cut out the soda and get the money straight from the parents to the schools. The kids would probably learn better without all the sugar anyway. But, that’s utopia for you.
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