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Standardized Testing More Important than Student Health?

Healthy lunch

Anyone who has been to a high school cafeteria in recent memory, should have been horrified at what schools feed their students. While it cannot be said that school cafeterias do not offer healthy lunch ideas to students, they also allow students to choose pizza, fries, and cookies on a daily basis, as well. Obviously, you cannot send a sixteen year old kid to school with five dollar bill and expect him or her to make healthy lunch choices. Although healthy lunches are available, most high schoolers are going to pass on the fresh garden salad or green beans in favor of pizza and fries every time. Assuming that parents care about the health of their children, this situation warrants an unwavering demand for healthy lunch ideas in every school cafeteria in America.

It does not take much intelligence to notice that public schools operate in illogical, even irrational, ways when it comes not only to curricula, but developing healthy lunch ideas. On one hand, schools are supposedly striving to leave no student behind by giving standardized tests that are worthless when it comes to actually applying the skills and knowledge that are being tested. On the other hand, those same schools seem apathetic, or at least ambivalent, when it comes to providing their students with healthy lunch ideas. Not only is this illogical, but it is absurd. How can schools prioritize standardized test while ignoring the health of their students? Consider this. Since schools also serve breakfast, for 10 months per year many students eat two of their three meals a day, five days per week, at school. This means that the majority of the meals that students eat during a year include pizza, fries, chips, candy bars, doughnuts, cookies, muffins, and soft drinks. While they may get one decent meal at home a day, that is just not enough. Therefore, there is an obvious need for healthy lunch ideas in school cafeterias.

School administrators need to come to their senses and prioritize what is best for their students. And with the lack of healthy lunch ideas, that is clearly not being done. It is just not logical to claim that schools want the best for kids, then fail to offer healthy lunch ideas. Once fatty and sugary foods are eliminated from school lunch menus, and healthy lunch ideas are added, can schools genuinely claim to care about students.

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