Marc Epstein, a veteran New York City teacher, describes a common phenomenon: the proliferation of junk food, which contributes to child obesity.
He recalls his own student days, when teachers absolutely prohibited chewing gum and snacks in the classroom.
In today’s schools, junk food is everywhere.
It’s bad for students, bad for discipline, and indicative of a society that refuses to set appropriate limits, allowing children to engage in harmful behaviors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Those huge back packs are loaded with junk food. I pull back a lab chair and it is filled with candy wrappers. I have a bank of drawers for equipment that have working locks except for 2 drawers that are empty. After a month, they are filled with candy wrappers.
It would be different if the number of violations was smaller. But they will never be smaller because the consequence has to given by the teacher in the form of a detention after multiple recorded violations. There is a 90% chance the student will not show up to detention. Then the detention has to be reassigned once if not twice. Then a referral is written to the dean who just waives it as he has students with more serious violations that fill the 12 chairs in his office in a school of 4,000.
Class sizes are now larger. Meetings twice a week often after school.
For many of us, we need to pick another battle.
This year, the high school I teach in installed machines with healthy snacks. I have yet to hear one of my students complain. On the contrary, I have only heard positive comments from my students.
I am glad for this improvement since on occasion, I have to feed one of my students.
Three weeks ago, I had a student arrive in class, and she asked to speak to me. She had just come from a doctor’s appointment, and she did not expect her mother to drop her off at school. The student had an injured leg requiring a brace but no brace that day. She had no bookbag; was missing her ID, and had not eaten lunch. She also had a music rehearsal after school. so no chance to eat following my class (mine was her last class, at 2:50 p.m.). She had no money.
She said her mother was in a ad mood since the mother found out that day that the leg required surgery.
My kids told me about the healthy snack machines. I bought her a couple of healthy snacks to eat during my class. I could not stop the dull pain she felt in her leg, but I could stop her hunger pangs.
COMPASS does not assess this scenario.
At our school, candy and junk food are often used as a reward to get kids to comply with “expectations.” Latest example here.
Another axiom in these new desperate times. It is always easier to apologize than to get permission. Thus junk food in the schools.
I could not tell you how many times I got that “I could have had a V-8” moment. Of course, that only came after denial.
Our schools could not have soda machines in the cafe. But there were soda machines in the hallway. The soda man filled the machine once a week. The teacher in charge filled it 3 times a week with soda from his car and pulled the coins. Interesting.
Now I know why my TGF Bank a Jewel Food Stores has 2 coin counting machines. Use this one to count your change free for having an account. Use the other one and pay 8%.
My only comment is to mention that in NC, the middle school is from 8:30a-3:30p, and many of them are so overcrowded that it is necessary to begin serving lunches at 10:15 in the morning. Growing kids get hungry in the afternoon, and it has become necessary for teachers to allow students to eat a snack to make it through the day. But is it a healthy snack? NO! As a teacher, I see free-lunch kids hauling whole boxes of goldfish, bags of potato chips, cookies, etc out of their bookbags to eat. Monster drinks, sports drinks, and coffee drinks are not allowed on campus, but we see kids getting out of carpool in the morning chugging these drinks. Its crazy
There is also a hunger problem in schools for children of low income no matter what the average income of the school district is. Kids often make up for lack of nutritional calories by cheap candy or snacks. Especially the new federal guidelines lowering calories in school lunches also exacerbates the problem. None of the new guidelines seems to have taken minority cultural tastes into account. And the most decisions were made from the top down, just like Race to the Top. There is a bullying method to all this criticizing.
In our school district a beautiful garden provides fresh produce for students in the school cafeteria. It also teaches them many life lessons as they plant, tend, and harvest vegetables. Lifelong habits associated with food can and should be established in every elementary school in America.
We all ate some junk food when we were younger. I have to wonder about the highly processed cheap food we as a society eat nowadays , including school lunches & breakfasts that are heated up & served instead of prepared by cooks as in the past. I think our American diet of processed food contributes to obesity in all of us more than gum & candy at school.
My 8th graders eat pop tarts for breakfast and wash them down with Coffee from Starbucks or an energy drink. Around 9am they crash, then go to lunch, visit our football funded concession stand and buy tons of candy and pop, then they climb on the ceiling for 7 and 8 period and go home. why we have this thing I will never know because we have a wellness policy! HA!
We can tell the parents how to dress their child, what shoes they can wear, when they have to be at school and that their child must be respectful. We have parent conferences over no effort, sleeping, no homework, no project and being disrespectful. However, suggest that their child eat a healthy breakfast or lunch and maybe not give them so much money for the candy concession and oh boy now the teacher has crossed a line!
It is ridiculous!