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School-Lunch Monitoring System for Parents
karvind writes "According to Yahoo, three school districts in the Atlanta area last week became the first in the country to offer the parental-monitoring option of an electronic lunch payment system called Mealpay.com. The system was initially designed as a convenient way to make sure children bought lunch without worrying that lunch money would get lost, spent on other things or stolen. But on parent's request online meal-monitoring option was added and now parents can see all of a student's lunch purchases."
I remember an interview with him in Playboy a while back.
Can't remember the exact quote, and I'm too lazy to look it up, but esesntially it said "Being my son's father, I forbid him from listening to Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor tapes, but I really hope he's sneaking them behind my back.".
This school lunch thing is all kinds of lame. Any parent who subscribes to this should be ashamed.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
A few years ago, one of the local IT start-up reached an agreement with the school board that is similar to this.
:) As you can probably guess almost every student signed up for 10 cards (morality? What's that?)- The pilot testing was withdrawn after six months.
What they offered was a debit-card look-a-like that uses prepaid credit to buy cafe food.
However they made a fatal mistake...
To maximize their chance of success in the pilot school (which was the one I attended, they had a plan where each new card would automatically get 10 dollar credits-
They never saw it coming
pity
I do wonder about forcing kids to do things this way. Are they being set up to rebel against healthy food when they are able?
... it is a replacement for educating children about good habits and nutrition. I'm not saying it's currently perfect in its execution, but if appropriately used this could be a very handy tool for the parents that want this control.
Maybe my view on this is slightly skewed because down here a lot of kids still take a packed lunch.
I'm looking at it this way; I have a fifteen year old sister who's going through that 'difficult kid' phase and isn't really eating all that well. She's basically wafer thin and refuses to eat a lot of stuff when she's around her mother and whenever I visit them I don't recall seeing her eat much at all. It's the kind of thing that leads to disorders.
If there was a system I could pre-pay meals for her and keep a track of them for my largely computer illiterate mother, I would. It would just be another tool to help us make sure we do our level best to help my sister turn out OK.
There are a lot of good reasons to keep track of a kids eating habits these days, despite the h4x0r paranoid among the slashdot crowd not being able to see them.
I am normally the first one to yell MOTHERFUCKER when government takes a right away (like installing 3000 camera's in chicago so the police can watch everyone, all the time, and have it recorded). But this is not government, this is a parent watching what their kid is eating.
Not to mention, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% of the students' parents don't pay for their lunches and they are on a reduced/free lunch program funded by tax-payers.
This is easy. If MY tax money is feeding the kids they get NO CHOICE. I want to pick what they eat. Nothing but carrots and soy milk. Why should a taxpayer give his money for a kid to eat greasy fries that will make him 50 pounds overweight, so when the kid becomes a 40 year old, taxpayers will once again have to pay for his high blood pressure medicine??
I would go one step further. Fund a study which asks "What kinds of food are good for the brain". Then feed them that. I would bet anyone that a healthy diet can raise the IQ by 10 points. I would bet half the ADD (attention disorders) and behavioral problems are related to diet. You get a kid filled with junk food, no vitamins, and too much sugar, and they act like little monkeys jumping out of their pants.
You have to teach students to eat well before you can expect them to eat well.
This is BS. When I was 10 I knew what was "healthy food", and I would pick McDonalds over it every day of the week and twice on sundays. I was young, but the commercials were really cool, McDonalds was a popular place, and I liked their food. Plus, you could get toys there.
No matter what a parent teaches their kid, it is hard to make the lesson stick when McDonalds has a commercial on TV every half hour telling your kids the exact opposite.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
My problem here, besides finding the whole idea quite aberrated and obnoxious, is that these kids will grow up being monitored with gps, cells, what they eat, how they spend, what they do on the net, etc. etc., and - god forbid - they will grow so used to being monitored that when grown up they will accept more easily all the stuff their government is even now trying to impose.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
You're assuming that those calories would be simply added on. Juice is more than just sugar, it also has vitamins, minerals, and various phytochemicals/antioxidants in it.
Studies have shown that people adjust their intake of food in the future if they eat a higher calorie food today. One such study used starch to "invisibly" boost the calorie content of soup that was served with a soup and sandwich lunch. The sandwiches were served cut up into small measured portions, the participants could take as many mini-sandwiches as they wanted. Those who received the higher calorie soup took fewer sandwiches the day after they consumed the soup.
The "clean your plate" and "don't snack, you'll spoil dinner" mentality is responsible for a lot of the obesity "epidemic". My kids have two rules: 1) eat when you are hungry, even if it isn't "time", and 2) stop when you are full. We don't put artificial rules on what they can eat. If there is cake in the house, and they want cake for dinner, they can have it. They rarely choose cake for dinner, even when it is available. When there is prewashed and prepared fruit and veggies in the fridge, they prefer that over things like candy bars, chips, ice cream, etc. But if there isn't anything ready to eat, they will go for the convenience junk foods.
Now if a kid is choosing the juice over water because that is what their peers are drinking, rather than because it is what they want, that is one thing, but if they child considers juice/water and feels like they want the juice, then they should have the juice.
With a lot of questions coming out about the true quality of and health issues regarding pre-package foods being served to children at schools, it could end up with the schools being seen seriously negligent in the meals being provided by schools to the children.
With the parents put back in control of their childrens school meals it does provide a future legal defence. Of course the real alternate is for schools to simply serve only healthy foods.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
just to say, up here in canada we were not allowed to leave the school premises either in elementary school.
a funny bit (or not so funny depending on how you look at it). my mom is the principal for one school, back a few years she told me some parents wanted the school yard to be locked and barbed so children couldn't leave at all (right now there's a fence, but the doors are open and you can leave with the proper authorization)