Our school currently offers ice cream for students to purchase during lunch. Most likely, this is meant to be a reward for the students and a simple way for the school to make some additional income. However, it seems that many of the potential drawbacks were never explored in the first place. On the outside, selling ice cream at school may look like a wonderful idea, but it is not this way all around. Selling ice cream at lunch can affect students' minds, prevent students from eating nutritional food, and disrupt classrooms later.
Recent studies have uncovered a very interesting fact: Drinking or consuming foods with temperatures of less than zero degrees on the Centigrade scale can cause short term losses of brain power. This typically can be measured as a three percent reduction to one's intelligent quotient. While this alone may not seem like much, especially since brain power is restored within an hour to an hour and a half time period, combined with the sugar in ice cream, this can be disastrous. When children and teenagers consume sugar, they are often unable to concentrate. After a bit of ice cream at lunch, students may not perform well academically for the rest of the day. Students may argue that they need the ice cream's sugar for extra energy. Eating foods with protein is a better solution though. Sugar causes your blood sugar to rise and then fall drastically, while protein gives you long lasting energy.
At Ola Middle School, students are required to have a lunch with them in order to buy ice cream. This seems like a great way to ensure students get more nutritional food as the core of their lunch. Nonetheless, there are many observable ways in which this rule is bent. The most obvious seems to be students borrowing lunches from other students. Even if a student does buy their own lunch, however, they may not get a chance to eat it in its entirety. Often, long lines can develop in front of the snack counter fairly quickly. It can take a student as long as fifteen minutes to get their ice cream. This leaves them no more than ten minutes to eat both their ice cream and regular lunch. It's not surprising that the average student eats their ice cream first. Also, when lunches are borrowed, even students that did bring or buy a lunch end up not getting much time to eat their lunches.
In addition to not providing nourishment and not allowing other nutritional food to be eaten, ice cream can later disrupt classroom behavior. As mentioned earlier, the sugar in ice cream causes blood sugar to rise and fall drastically as with the glycemic index. What this means is that right after eating ice cream, the students will be very hyper. This can obviously prevent the teacher from being able to keep control or his or her class. Later the students who ate ice cream will "crash," thereby loosing concentration. A class with sleepy students is not all that much better than a chaotic class. Without ice cream, teachers generally have a more well behaved and attentive class to teach.
Overall, ice cream sales are a poor choice for Ola Middle School. While on the outside it may seem like a solid idea for several reasons, these reasons do not outweigh the negatives. Put simply, sugary products that are not healthy should not be available for sale at school on a daily basis. Ice cream gains the extra negative of being quite cold, which can lower brain power. The school needs to reassess its initial idea and instead opt to make money and reward students differently.