Great Taste – Less Waste

Children in public school may be very thirsty

As millions of children leave the house and head for school every day, many of them are heading out for a full day of thirst. Considering the amount of time they spend at school, every child should be drinking at least three 8 ounce glasses of water while in the school. That is a pretty tall order when they only have the drinking fountain to get water from. It would be hard to drink down 8 ounces of water from a fountain; a cup would make it so much easier and far more possible, but cups are an expensive luxury and sometimes even viewed as a distraction.

Since First Lady Michelle Obama has taken on childhood obesity as her issue of choice, many things are coming to our attention including our kids being dehydrated. Getting enough water to drink is important to keeping a healthy weight in children. In fact it’s key to keeping a healthy weight in everyone. Imagine if you will spending a full 8 hour day at work and only drinking milk or orange juice, and if you wanted water having to go to a fountain to get it. Most adults wouldn’t put up with these conditions in any location and certainly not for a full 8 hour day. But our kids put up with it, in fact it’s just normal to them so nothing is said and nothing is done.

Every day at lunch children are allowed to choose between orange juice and milk. Both of these drinks are good enough but perhaps not the best choice. Children spent time at school each day playing at recess, exerting during Physical Education class and all they are offered is a quick drink at the fountain. There is no way for them to catch up on the water they need at lunch because water isn’t on the menu. Older students can buy a bottle of water out of the machine but it may be flavored, so just plain healthy great tasting drinking water seems very hard to come by.

As part of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act that Congress passed in December 2010, all schools have to provide water in the eating area of the school. But, all they have to do is have a drinking fountain near the lunch room. So if a student would prefer water with lunch, they have to sit down, eat part of their lunch, then get up and go to the fountain for a drink and return to their lunch because there are certainly no cups available. That is absurd, to expect our children to do that for a drink of water. It is fairly certain that children don’t choose to have water with their lunch then. In fact most of them will take the milk and usually the flavored sugar-laden milk at that. That means that instead of giving their body the necessary hydration it requires, they are instead feeding it more sugar. No wonder the health of our children is deteriorating. Being able to have a simple cup of water at the table with lunch is all it would take to begin reducing the amount of obesity in our kids.

Educators claim that providing cups is an expense their budgets can’t handle. Chicago public schools, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Atlanta Public Schools and Clark County Public School District in Nevada, all do not provide cups for drinking water to any students. In fact most public school systems across the country don’t provide cups. “Water fountains aren’t providing adequate hydration,” says Matt Sharp, senior advocate of the California Food Policy Advocates. The simple fact is that most students have to stand in line at the drinking fountain with an educator nearby encouraging them all to hurry up and think of the other students. Time is limited for the water fountain and they simply cannot get a large amount of water drank under those conditions.

The UCLA/RAND Center for Adolescent Health Promotion, a CDC-funded prevention research program has been testing a way to get children drinking more water at mealtime to help combat our obesity epidemic. It’s called a water intervention, a 5 week research program that includes installing a water filter in the school, filling 5 gallon jugs with filtered water, chilling them overnight, and then placing them in the lunchroom with cups. This was done in 5 schools in the Los Angeles school district provided free. “We’ve seen students really gravitate towards the water out here and fill up their cups right before and after lunch to hydrate” says Burt Cowgill, the project manager. “The water is very popular and we have a lot of participation.” However once the research project ended it was up to the school district to continue providing the cups and water. The Los Angeles Unified School District says it cannot afford the estimated $1.8 million to $2.3 million every year to provide the cups and water for the entire district. Who knew that water was so expensive, even restaurants give a cup of water with a meal at no charge. The real kicker may well be those nice drink machines that every school has in the foyer. The school makes money off those machines and if they also provide cups of free water at lunch, how many kids would then buy bottled water from the machine? Likely not very many and that is the real problem. Schools don’t want to spend money they may not have and then make less from the machines too.

It all boils down to what parents will do to guarantee their children get enough to drink during the day. Many parents send a lunch with their kids to school; perhaps it’s time to add a water bottle full of great tasting water to that lunch. No one can make the schools install a water filtration system, but there are home water treatment systems available to everyone. These systems can provide every home with great tasting water right from the kitchen sink or a convenient water cooler. We can fill a water bottle from the kitchen tap put it in the lunch box and tell our kids to be sure and drink it at school. While this won’t guarantee they get enough, it is a place to start. Drinking water is necessary for human life, it’s time to make sure our kids’ life is all it should be. Help them get enough to drink so they can focus in class and learn the material they are expected to know. Maybe someone will teach them about water and how important it is to us; perhaps that person will be you.