Modern Health Education Act (Final Vote)

[Associate Justice PiT]

     On the issue of getting kids to eat healthier, schools should be cooking lunches on-site. I have seen that occasionally, but much more often I'll see prepackaged lunches shipped in from a local high school. I can only imagine how much that stuff gets packed with preservatives.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     We're looking roughly at $20/hour per head for labor averaged through the kitchen and $5/student meal, along with overhead of around $1,000/day. I'd guess you need 1 dishwasher for every 60 students, 1 prep chef for every 100, 3 line cooks, a sous chef, and a head chef. These numbers are very ballpark, but are based on my experience in kitchenwork.
 
     Supposing 250 students (a typical size for an elementary school, though there is variation at all levels), we'd be looking at $2,530/day.

EDIT: I miscalculated on the labor costs. It's actually going to be $4,490/day.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I guess that's why we don't do it already.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Exceedingly unhealthy is exceedingly vague.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Exceedingly unhealthy is exceedingly vague.

Do you have any recommendations for a better wording or clarification of the point?

     Limit caloric content in school meals? It is the most direct link to weight gain.

[Associate Justice PiT]

That looks good, apart from the extracurricular typo

     I was wondering if it were some sort of antiquated term.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     We could base it on nutrient density. Require that school lunches meet some average nutrient density that constitutes a reasonable level of healthiness. I'd suggest 30, or the nutrient density of whole-wheat bread, as a baseline but we can go higher or lower.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I meant 30 as an average. So we can have something less nutritious (like beef), but it would have to be balanced out by something more healthy (like spinach). In light of that, the average could be way higher than 30 even.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Responding to Senators Yankee and Canadaland, you're both on the money here.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Isn't this one of those issues where we know it when we see it? We know fried food is not good for you, and salad is. But we also know that chips every so often is not harmful.

There is nothing wrong with a school having chips, say, once a week on a friday, while having other types of food on different days, in fact that should be applauded, and I think one blanket ban on anything below a certain amount would be a bad idea, because food is neither healthy nor unhealthy on its own, but becomes so based on how often it is had.

     What I am proposing actually lines up pretty well with what you are saying; that is, we can have less healthy food as long as we balance it out with more healthy food.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I think that might work better, actually. If you give the kids spinach and chips together, they'll probably just eat the chips. If you give them one one day and the other the next, they have less opportunity to avoid eating healthy food.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     That's the best I could find, sorry. We could probably entrust one of our own government agencies to develop a standard.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Looking over the bill, I wonder a bit about Section 6. I know of some very small public high schools. The Oakland Unified School District operates one with 88 students and another with 130. With such small student bodies at some schools, it is conceivable that there is a school where there is simply not interest in a Gay-Straight Alliance.

     I'm not sure what the best way to resolve that is, but I would suggest we take such a possibility into account. The current text requires without qualification that one be established.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Looking over the bill, I wonder a bit about Section 6. I know of some very small public high schools. The Oakland Unified School District operates one with 88 students and another with 130. With such small student bodies at some schools, it is conceivable that there is a school where there is simply not interest in a Gay-Straight Alliance.

     I'm not sure what the best way to resolve that is, but I would suggest we take such a possibility into account. The current text requires without qualification that one be established.

I am hessitant to wade into this issue as it would naturally be an area of sensitivity for many and too limit it to just larger schools could potentially leave people in smaller districts left out obviously, but short of a basement on the size of the district, is there any other available means with which to resolve this potential problem?

     The problem with that proposal is that Oakland is a pretty large school district. It just happens to operate a couple of small high schools among other larger ones. Potentially there could be a floor on the size of the school.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I think 200 would be reasonable, considering the generic high school size is typically held to be about 2,000 students. 200 puts us at 10%.

[Associate Justice PiT]

How is interest in a Gay-Straight Alliance related to school size?

     If you have a school with only ~100 students, it is feasible that no students would be interested in it due to the small sample size. It may be problematic to require an organization that no students at the school are interested in joining.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Aye