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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."
They need it more ethan little kids do.
12 year olds are entitled to many rights.
One of them shouldn't be hiding your lunchtime purchases with money given to you by your parents.
Where is the violation of rights here? The parents want to know their money is being spent in a wise manner.
Canibalism. They wont ring that up on their silly machines.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Now they need to install a monitoring system to kids underpants to track their toilet visits and we're done. Who cares that kids grow up pissed-off and psychotic? We better treat them like some kettle. And if they ever get over the edge - blame TV & computers.
This is a great idea. We all know how well things usually turn out when personal information about underage students is put online by their school district.
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.
You have to teach students to eat well before you can expect them to eat well. I'm tired of seeing parents who only make a home cooked meal once a week, live off of hamburger helper and delivery pizza, send the kid to grade school and middle school where the provided lunches are fried everything (hamburgers, hamburger pizza, spaghetti with melted cheese, cheese sandwiches, hotdogs, weiner wraps, macaroni and cheese, fish sticks, chicken nuggets and so on) - and some how expect them to make the same wise meal choices that YOU don't make for YOURSELF or FOR THEM or that their SCHOOLS have made for them thus far.
The fact is that children will have a better appetite for better things if they're used to them. A kid who grows up on steak, potatos and veggies will prefer that whereas a kid that grew up on over-salted, over-sugared, mostly-synthetic boxed/pre-packaged/ready-mix/vending machine/deep fried/fast food/delivery/microwavable/tv dinner foods will prefer those types of foods.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.
I am glad to see more stories targeting the average age of slashdot users.
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.
Schools ought to provide lunches for all children. The current situation where some kids get subsidized lunches while others bring their own lunches is one more method of separating children into castes within the school and that, in turn, leads to animosity. Whether it is the rich kids mocking the poor kids or the kids with Libertarian parents mocking the kids with parents on the dole, subsidizing only a fraction of the children leads to unnecessary divisions.
Public schooling is free. The lunches ought to be provided free as well. The cost to feed a handful of students is only marginally cheaper than feeding all the students and a school district can fully feed all the children in any school by prioritizing expenses.
In regards to the article in question, in my day we had things called monthly menu calendars which parents who were interested in what kids were eating could pick up at the school office. There wasn't any choice in a meal. If a kid was eating the cafeteria lunch, it was plain to see what was being eaten. I fail to see how a computerized system makes this any better. Nor do I see how giving kids a choice in free lunches makes the cafeteria cheaper and easier to run.
Next week we'll be reading a story about how some criminal hacked the system and found out what everyone had for lunch!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Comment removed based on user account deletion
School is a public place. Parents (whose money is being spent) probably do have the right to know how that money is spent, and if it brings to light that a child is being bullied out of lunch-money sooner, that can't be anything other than a good thing.
But I worry about the seeds being sown, and the harvest we will reap. When a child is constantly being placed under surveillance in different circumstances, and knowingly so, it will tend towards the 'norm' of that child's cultural world. It will become accepted rather than questioned - what are the benefits? What are the costs? Is it worth it ? I fear for a future when the question is not 'why are we under surveillance?', but 'why are you not watching out for XXX?'.
"They" (and by 'they', I mean 'we') are sucking the lifeblood out of personal freedom, one pinprick and one drop of blood at a time. More and more freedom is being just handed over, and the responsibility that went with that freedom dies a little too. Without the responsibility for actions taken, there is no choice in life - welcome to the herd mentality, and kiss goodbye to that magnificence of spirit - individuality.
Quite a leap from telling parents about their childrens lunching habits, but as Francis Xavier said "Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards". Young minds are receptive minds, and missionaries tend to understand indoctrination better than most.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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?
You know, at some point parents need to give their kids a little bit of space. Sending their kids off to school is a good first step and I think common sense would suggest that parents should spend a little more time encouraging children to communicate with them. If a bully is stealing their money or the lunch program sucks, the best surveillance system is the kid's eyes. Or maybe we should fund education a little better so schools and classes can be a more reasonable size where teacher observations together with well-balanced kids can work out normal human solutions. This seems like a better solution than teaching the kids to depend on surveillance cameras. On the other hand maybe the institutions putting in these systems have a vested interest in teaching the next generation to be accepting of cameras everywhere.
Are parents that emotionally detached from their kids? I mean, couldn't you just ask your kids what they ate for lunch?
Yeah, kids make mistakes, but they're still human. If your body wants protein, you're gonna crave a steak. If your body needs calcium, you'll crave some orange juice or vegetables. I don't think we really have to worry too much about kids buying six dollars worth of snickers bars every day.
In fact, the only situation where I could see this being used is for anorexic teenagers, to make sure that they're actually purchasing food. Which sounds great, in theory, but considering the fact that anorexia is usually linked to domineering parents, a history of sexual abuse, and an inescapable urge to be in control of something, then monitoring an anorexic's every food purchase is not a good way to help them regain control of their life.
This is just ridiculous. They're your kids. They're not supposed to be convenient, they're supposed to be huge pains in the ass who are hard as hell to raise right. You can't just slap a tracking device on them and monitor and measure everything they do so you can fit them into a spreadsheet report.
If you can't ask your kids what they had for lunch and get an honest answer, you have a much bigger problem than the lack of an online monitoring service.
Perhaps this article, then, is not intended that way, and is placed under YRO for some other reason.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I got really thirsty one day and caved in. My fellow boycotters pooh-poohed me. I had sold out to the man.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
... 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.
"Why don't we simply pre-emptively incarcerate all kids in padded cells?"
Seriously, what the fuck is it with these "all or nothing" attitudes?
They're children. They need to be treated as such, but always to a point.
You can't wrap them up in a blanket of ignorance, but at the same time you can't give them free reign to run their own lives when they're barely into the double digit age bracket.
I would love to have checked it out but:
"Your browser is not supported for use with this site. This site requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or above on Windows platforms or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 or above on Macintosh platforms. You can download the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer by clicking the link below."
Imagine my suprise to learn that this school lunch site was offering me the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer for Linux. But then I follow the link provided only to learn there is no such critter. It would seem that this WWW isn't so world wide, you have to use a proprietary browser that is only provided for an extremely limited number of OS.
Forget the whole big brother issue, this concept should be banned on the browser issue alone.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I happen to live in the Atlanta area. I happen to go to school. I happen to go to a school that is using Mealpay. Here's how it works in practice. Every student is assigned a six (new kids get 7 digits now) digit number. This number is used to log into the school's computer network and to buy food at lunch. At every checkout line is a small keypad where we punch in that number. Once we do that, the lady working the register punches in what we buy on a touch screen. We can either pay for it cash or have it automatically deducted.
Most of that you could have gathered from the article, I know. Anyway, I think its a decent system compared to our old one. Before we had to either bring cash every day or go down to the cafeteria first thing in the morning to drop off a check and hope you get to homeroom on time. Now all I have to do is go online and a few clicks later I have food tommorow. My mom doesn't really care what I pick up at lunch and even if she did she is way to computer illiterate to figure out how to look up what I've been eating. Also the line moves much faster now that the whole thing is mostly automated instead of waiting for the lunch lady to find my name among a million others in the computer.
What do Saddam Hussain and Little Miss Muffet have in common? They have Kurds in their Whey.
And the parent post has it right, what the hell is wrong with 12 more oz of juice? Not soda or kool-aid, JUICE. 150 calories? This mom sounds like she's pushing her daughter into "only thin girls get the boys."
It's times like this I regret being a libertarian, because Mrs. Mary Carol Eddleman should have never been allowed to breed.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
While I agree with you in principle, juice really isn't that healthy. Most juices are not much better than soda, with just a few more nutrients and no caffiene. It's mostly sugar water.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
ummm how do you get that coke is ok from that statement? to me it suggests coke is just as bad...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
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.
Other than the good points already made, I'd like to add one: _everyone_ needs some privacy. _Noone_ is a 100% extrovert that actually likes having someone watching them (or over their shoulder) 24 hours a day. Even the most affectionate cat, if you own one, wants to just be alone and left alone now and then.
It seems that the way it's heading for children these days is basically monitored all day long: what you eat (via this), where you go (via GPS), exactly when, what and how many hours you've played on the computer, etc. Geeze, talk about pure stress.
Plus, this kind of 24h a day surveillance is one of those things that say "I don't trust you one bit, and nothing you could ever say or do will make me believe a word you say." It's not a fun message to grow up with.
Plus, in this case it's not even just privacy, taking away even what little freedom that kid had to start with. When I was a kid I'd want to occasionally save a little and buy something else. Dunno, a book, a cheap toy, something. But now nosiree, bob, the money will go directly to the cafeteria, and the kid gets to just receive whatever meal the parent selected (because if you take anything else, momy and daddy will know).
As someone else put it, "why don't you just lock them up in a little cell, then?"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
wtf.."You failed to confirm you're a human.."
Seems the Revenge of the Nerds got to you too. The removal of your human rights has been confirmed.
Welcome to Nerdtopia!
What about buildig confidence on love and trust?
We can't have that. Someone might get hurt.
Then someone will most surely get sued.
And that's expensive.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
...for you parents who don't have problems with controlling every aspect of your child's life at school, since those of us without sprogs obviously don't have a clue about parenting.
It's called "taking 5 minutes in the morning to make them a sandwich." School lunch in US schools is utter slop anyway, in most cases.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
It's not privacy violation, it's personality violation.
Don't take this personally, but I think you should find some other way to convince your daughter to eat healthier. Maybe use an old practise called... discussion.
I mean c'mon pal, it's perfectly normal for a 5-year old to prefer pizza than vegetables.
www.lemonodor.com A mostly Lisp weblog
A lot of people seem to be saying that kids are given too much freedom, and that is why they are so reckless when they become adults.
I disagree. I think that kids are irresponsible because they don't have enough resposibility. And responsibility can only come with freedom -- the freedom to make choices and make mistakes.
This is a different kind of freedom than the freedom to play computer games all day or get expensive gadgets without working. It is a much more mature freedom.
But you can't pick and choose what freedoms they get, because otherwise it isn't real freedom. If you're going to be a responsible parent you need give them the responsibility related freedoms (jobs, self-motivated education and the sense that their gadgets come from money saved up in a responsible way, though possibly with parental subsidy) with the other kids of freedoms (allowed to stay out late, go to parties, etc.)
Both of these kinds of freedom prepares them for the adult world, where you are free to go to parties and have to pay the bills. What happens now is kids get out of high school and either go to college and get drunk all the time and get into abusive (receiving or giving) relationships that don't give them any real training in another life responsibilty, building mature relationships, or they go into the work force and have a really hard time dealing with 9 to 5 jobs because they've never had to balance fun freedoms with responsible ones.
This causes a lot of problems. We have a culture that romanticizes our youth. Why is it this way? I think it is this way primarily for the same reasons kids go off to college and act irresponsibly -- they're not ready for life responsibilities and dream of the care-free past. Unfortunately, that just leads to sucky adult lives.
If you learn how to balance fun and responsibility as a youth, with parental support and guidance when you mess up, then your life is fuller.
I blame parents, not the system. Parents need to decide that they don't need to work as much, that the schools job isn't to raise mature adults, and that being scared that your kid might f-up on your watch and shame you isn't an excuse to reign them in until they leave the house (so it's someone else's problem.)
Even if you want to blame the system, it isn't like it is taking away your ability to parent. Computer games and T.V. are rotting your kids minds? Then don't have a T.V.! Your kids have weird ideas about relationships and sex? Then you'd better sit your butt down and talk to them about it -- not just a lecture as to why something is or isn't good, but a heart-to-heart talk where the goal is for you to respect the other.
I can't think of a single parental role that the system has taken away that you can't take back if you choose to.
And if you say you need to work jobs to pay the bills, then I suggest you own less stuff and you start getting politically active and fight to remove us from a system that requires every generation work more than the one before it.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Let me give you some insight into privacy from a kid's point of view, because that's one of the things I still haven't forgotten. Much as I'd actually like to.
My most unpleasant memories are the pure stress associated with growing up with a mother and grandma who wanted to know _everything_ I do, every move I make, every breath I take. I usually had a parent coming with me to summer camps, or at least to the same town, to be damn sure what I do there too.
But wait, it goes downhill from there.
The first problem with that is receiving an endless stream of advice, typically in the form of being told how everything I ever did was wrong. The way I walked, the way I talked, the way I combed my hair, the way I ate, etc. They just had to tell me what minuscule detail I did less than 100% perfect. Even if I decided to, dunno, clean up my room or whatever, the usual "encouragement" was being told how I did it wrong.
Unfortunately that meant that it seemed most of the time like why-the-heck do I even bother, because everything I do is wrong anyway. Probably the only "right" thing to do was to sit and stare at a wall, or something.
It leaves permanent damage. I'm in the mid-30's now, and I still have to overcome an instinct to not even try whenever I want to start doing anything. I do overcome it, but somewhere in the back of my brains there's a circuit that _still_ says "mom probably wouldn't approve _that_, either." And I don't mean for doing anything bad, but even for mundane stuff like throwing the laundry into the washing machine: mom would probably disapprove of the temperature it's set on, or the exact quantity of detergent, or whatever.
Think you know better than to do that? Well, tell that to the lady in the story who got her knickers in a knot about her daughter buying 4 oz of juice to wash the food down with. ("Nooo! It's 150 calories!") Geeze, 4 oz is a _third_ of the liquid in, say, a can of coke. But even for that some retard had to basically go and tell her child, "no, again whatever you decide is wrong, and I know better than you."
Yeah, I'm with you about the license-to-breed part: I wish such retards were prevented from breeding, because I foresee some very serious psychological problems in that daughter's future.
But let's go back to my story, because it goes downhill from there.
The other problem about parents knowing everything is that they just had to talk to _everyone_ about it. And I really mean _everyone_, including perfect strangers on the street or the new cashier at the supermarket. A lot more positively than the feedback _I_ got, too. I guess they were very proud of me, or something, which isn't unusual for a parent. (Would have been nice to also tell _me_ that, though, instead of only negative feedback.) But still, every minute of my life was dissected
Why is that a problem? Because knowledge is power, and it gave others power over my life too. E.g., I couldn't tell a little white lie like "sorry, can't go with you there today, I haven't finished homework yet." Everyone already knew, or was going to be told, exactly at what hour I really finished homework and what did I do after that. _That_ kind of being a public figure essentially leaves you with a lot less choices of what you can do without losing every single friend you still have.
As late as high school, mom actually phoned my girlfriend to tell her basically "oh no, he does have plenty of time today." And not even tell me that she interfered. That was the end of that relationship there and then.
You know, other kids grow up dreaming of becoming an astronaut or a jedi or something. My nice fantasy was about the day when mom will finally STFU (Shut The Fsck Up) about me. Quite a nice fantasy too, but sadly just as unrealistic as the one about jedis. Still hasn't happened.
I actually liked school. It was the time when I finally had some time without someone looking over my shoulder.
Ironically, that's also a large factor in what drove me
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I like the whole idea, but for a whlly different reason.
The next time you find out your kids have been fed crap (as witnessed in the UK recently by the fights celebrity cook Jamie Oliver had to put up to get decent food introduced) you have a nice, clean, court admissable track record.
Ah, liability. That school obviously still has a *lot* to learn about tracking - it cuts both ways.
(and no, I would never track my child - how else can you teach what trust is about?)
= Ch =
Insert
Last year MealPay had failed to credit my son's account twice. Let me tell you, explaining to your child why has the cafeteria people stamped his hand three days in a row is an embarassing experience for both parties involved. (To those of you unfamiliar with the practice, cafeterias put stamps on childrens' hands when they run out of money on their accounts.) I called MealPay to find out what happened, and the Tech Support lady there told me *I* had to call Gwinnett County school board and tell them that their credit card payment module in MealPay's software isn't working. You guessed it right, I am paying for my son's lunches with a check now. One of two or three paper checks that I have to write a month.