Fast Food Nightmare: Kids With Good Grades "Win" McDonald's Happy Meals in Florida
Posted Oct 02 2008 3:13pm
In school, kids are supposed to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Is it too much to ask that children also begin to get some nutrition basics from at least one of their teachers?
Apparently, in Florida's Seminole County, the notion of teaching kids about healthy eating and good food is a foreign one.
The school board there struck the most ill-conceived, nutritionally horrific, jaw-droppingly bad deal with McDonald's restaurants in Seminole County: For the 2007-2008 school year, elementary school kids with good grades and near-perfect attendance are rewarded with Happy Meals.
That's right. If you're one of the 27,000 school kids from kindergarten through fifth grade who does well in school and comes all but one or two days to classes, you get a "food prize" -- nutritionally lacking, fatty, sugar-or-culprit-carbs laden, calorie-packed junk food.
As if that wasn't bad enough, as part of this so-called "report card incentive" program, the Seminole County schools also are allowing McDonald's to turn report cards into advertising vehicles. In fact, Stuart Elliot of the New
York Times so aptly puts it, the Florida schools are "using children's report cards to help stimulate sales [at McDonald's]."
In school, kids are supposed to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Is it too much to ask that children also begin to get some nutrition basics from at least one of their teachers?
Apparently, in Florida's Seminole County, the notion of teaching kids about healthy eating and good food is a foreign one.
The school board there struck the most ill-conceived, nutritionally horrific, jaw-droppingly bad deal with McDonald's restaurants in Seminole County: For the 2007-2008 school year, elementary school kids with good grades and near-perfect attendance are rewarded with Happy Meals.
That's right. If you're one of the 27,000 school kids from kindergarten through fifth grade who does well in school and comes all but one or two days to classes, you get a "food prize" -- nutritionally lacking, fatty, sugar-or-culprit-carbs laden, calorie-packed junk food.
As if that wasn't bad enough, as part of this so-called "report card incentive" program, the Seminole County schools also are allowing McDonald's to turn report cards into advertising vehicles. In fact, Stuart Elliot of the New York Times so aptly puts it, the Florida schools are "using children's report cards to help stimulate sales [at McDonald's]."