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Phil Gainous is in a sticky spot. The board of education in Montgomery County, Md., decided this was the year when sugary sodas and non-nutritious snacks must disappear from high school vending machines, replaced by healthier options.

Gainous isn’t against promoting healthy habits. But as the veteran principal of Montgomery Blair High School, the county’s largest and most economically diverse, he says replacing the vending contents will deprive his 3,300 students in other ways. The school is located in Silver Spring, one of Maryland’s sprawling suburbs, and many of its students aren’t so well off. Some students at Blair tend to come from families that can’t afford what their neighbors have. Many don’t have money for extras like schools trips, or even for the fees required to take the Advanced Placement or SAT exams.

Gainous has relied on profits from vending contracts, earning as much as $200,000 per year, to underwrite a broad spectrum of student needs and interests. Since the vending machine contents changed to fruit juices, bottled water, popcorn and lower-calorie versions of cheese puffs and potato chips, students haven’t been buying as much. During the past school year, Montgomery Blair received just $55,000 in vending profits.

 

“I worry,” Gainous says. “This is a county of haves and have-nots.”

Tough Tradeoffs
High school principals all over the country are becoming soldiers in the assault on non-nutritious snack foods sold at school. National studies of childhood nutrition continue to document sugary sodas as a major cause of obesity as teenagers consume 500 to 1,000 calories a day in sugar-sweetened beverages.

School boards and many state legislators have chosen a prime target–school-based vending machines, typically stocked with colas, bags of chips and cheesy snacks. A survey by the Education Commission of the States lists 15 states, including Maryland, that have organized task forces or committees on the state level that are studying nutrition issues.

No state has yet banned soda sales outright, though nine have enacted some restrictions on the sale of vending-machine sodas and snacks. Since 2003, California has required public hearings before school districts can renew their vending contracts. In West Virginia, a law adopted earlier this year bans the sale of sodas to younger children and requires that half the beverages in high school vending machines be juices, waters and other healthier drinks. In Kentucky, vending machines in all schools must be turned off until 30 minutes after lunch.

The question of a statewide ban has surfaced in several states, but lawmakers seem unwilling to take such a sweeping step. Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell vetoed a proposed statewide school junk-food ban this summer, saying parents and school boards should decide how best to address health issues during the school day.

The Connecticut Association of Boards of Education campaigned against the proposal, citing the potential loss of revenue from soda contracts and the state education department expense that would be required to police it. “They’re having a hard enough time getting all the resources they need for No Child Left Behind,” said spokesman Nick Caruso. “These are all distractions from the real mission.”

Declining Sales
Where local decisions have cut back on vending options, many principals have supported the changes, saying schools should set a good example. But they also feel conflicted. Beverage distributors, especially those affiliated with Coke and Pepsi, offer schools lucrative contracts that include signing bonuses, a share in machine profits and perks such as athletic scoreboards. Portland, Ore., school officials cite earnings of more than $250,000 per year from high school vending commissions. San Diego Unified schools signed a $1 million deal with Coca-Cola in 2003 to sell only its products in high school machines. Larger school districts, like Los Angeles, have earned millions.

School districts generally report that they receive between 40 and 50 percent of the price of each bottle or can of carbonated drinks purchased. High schools in Everett, Wash., were getting 50 percent. But the profit from healthier noncarbonated beverages, such as milk and water, has dropped that profit to about 15 percent, says Superintendent Carol Whitehead.

A survey of food sales in California schools by the University of California at Berkeley concluded that while cafeterias seem to adapt to changes in food offerings and manage to maintain revenue levels, vending sales nearly always suffer when contents are changed.

Fran Rothstein, president of Montgomery Blair’s parent organization, says it’s a painful debate. “Parents want their children to be educated and they realize the money from the machines helps educate their kids,” she says, adding, “That’s a disgusting situation to be in.”

Precarious Support
At Montgomery Blair, the fallout has been especially acute. While most schools tend to use their vending proceeds to support extracurricular activities and athletics, marching band uniforms and entertainment at school dances, Gainous has been using his school’s funds for a range of needs as diverse as student registration fees for the SAT and Advanced Placement exams and two-way radios for the school’s administrators.

“We were buying textbooks, school supplies, calculators, furniture, weight equipment for phys-ed and paying for security aides,” the principal says. The soda money paid for a hydraulic lift so custodians would have access to mechanical areas in the school’s especially high ceilings. It was an item the school board wouldn’t fund.

Blair’s allocation from the district for security cameras wasn’t sufficient for the sprawling, three-level building, so Gainous had to spend another $30,000 for that unmet need. “And on and on and on,” he says.

So far, students aren’t lining up to feed their dollar bills into the restocked snack machines. Blair’s student newspaper, Silver Chips, reported that feelings about the revised food and drink offerings are mixed. Some students resent being treated like babies. “You can’t make people change their diet just by changing the snacks in the vending machines,” said one student. “I think it’s punishing everybody instead of helping them eat better.”

The school’s conflict reached embarrassing levels last year as Montgomery Blair became a media target in the sugar wars, held up as a complaining school that cared more about money than student health. “We had press in here from England and China and Switzerland and all over the United States because we’re rotting out the kids’ teeth to make a profit,” Gainous says. “I ended up on every kind of panel that existed. The University of Maryland had a national panel of health reporters, and here I am in the middle.”

Gainous tried to use these public appearances as opportunities to share the story of his school’s unfunded needs, and he has won some sympathy. One retired teacher donated $2,000 to offset test registration fees for students from lower-income families. Parents do their part to fill these needs. They held a silent auction in April, raising $15,000. “But it doesn’t go far,” says Rothstein, the PTA president.

Welcome Change
Montgomery Blair’s predicament is exactly what Brenda Elliott, principal of Stratford High School in Nashville, Tenn., fears. With state law imposing stringent nutrition standards on schools by fall 2006, her county school board is moving toward banning foods that don’t address the obesity concerns.

Elliott welcomes the changes for health purposes. “The time is right,” she said. But she’s keenly aware of the cost. She uses $18,000 in vending machine profits annually to pay for equipment, paper and textbooks. The basic needs are acute, she says, because the district’s textbook allocation dropped this past year from $70 to $40 per child.

“That’s not how we should fund schools. But the reality is that is that’s how we fund schools,” she says.

Elliott received a taste of what could be coming as the school year moved toward a close and the school district’s vendor stopped filling the machines. She still had purchases to make. “We thought we might have to start selling potato chips in the hallway so we could make it through the end of the year,” she says.

Still, Elliott isn’t going to protest the changes in vending contents. She wants to find a way to get healthier foods in students’ hands and to make more money. She hopes community organizations and companies will recognize the needs and come to the rescue. She already has talked to Vanderbilt University about becoming part of a study on childhood health.

“We want to look to our community, maybe some health-conscious agencies or parents to help us,” she says.

Appleton’s Answer
A comprehensive effort that focuses on eating, physical activity and other habits is the only real way to address student health. In many school cafeterias, students still have daily access to french fries, pizza and smoothies–the same fare they’d find at McDonald’s.

Superintendent Paul Mc-Kendrick in Lynchburg, Va., said youngsters need to learn about healthy lifestyles and eating sugary snacks in moderation. The Lynchburg school board has changed some of its cafeteria items, but it has kept sodas in the vending machines, alongside healthier options.

“We have a lot of options–water, juices, diet sodas,” Mc-Kendrick says. “There are chips and so forth. But [the machines] aren’t just filled with sugary or fatty foods. Just because they’re selecting a honey bun or cinnamon roll doesn’t mean they’re unhealthy. You have to look at what that child is eating in other places. It’s a huge issue. More than one factor contributes to a child being obese.”

School leaders in Appleton, Wis., were among the first in the country to look at the problem holistically, and the results are something the school district still brags about. Most recently, Appleton educators appeared in the documentary film “Supersize Me” about the ill effects of a fast-food diet.

The school district spent two years working with Natural Ovens, a local food company, to develop a breakfast and lunch program at Central Alternative High School, which serves students with behavioral problems, and one of its elementary schools. Vending machines were removed, and the company helped the school build a kitchen and staff it with two cooks.

“They focused on fresh fruits and vegetables,” as well as whole grains, said Appleton’s Assistant Superintendent Lee Allinger.

Within weeks staff noticed a change among students in both schools.

“The ability to focus in the classroom was more apparent,” Allinger says. “There were fewer issues with discipline, and attendance improved at the at-risk high school. There were fewer health complaints like headaches and stomach aches. There was also a reduced feeling of hunger at mid-morning and mid-afternoon, less moodiness and more calm.

“And one of the biggest things was that we began to see the kids were taking the practices and carrying them over outside of school.”

One beverage distributor tried to persuade the school district to keep its soda machines. “Coke came and met with the superintendent and myself,” Allinger says. “Their angle was that soda isn’t responsible for obesity; it’s only a factor. So I said, ‘So you’d want your child to drink Coke at 9 in the morning?’ She didn’t have much to say about that.”

Phased-In Approach
In St. Joseph, Mo., vending machine changes were part of a larger wellness plan devised with Heartland Health, a consortium of hospitals, doctors and other health groups. The district’s campaign includes free dental care, immunizations and well-child exams and a program to reduce teen-age pregnancy. A new emphasis addresses body-mass index of children in an attempt to reduce obesity.

“At age 11, a normal range is 21 to 24 percent body fat,” says Donna Wilson, Heartland’s youth health coordinator. “The average percent for 2003-04 was 24.3. Then it was 26.8 percent. We have not fully addressed the problem.”

Last summer, vending machines were converted to carry only diet sodas, 100 percent fruit juice and bottled water. During the 2005-2006 school year, the diet sodas will go. And vending items meet stringent criteria. Each snack offering may derive no more than 30 percent of its calories from fat and must contain fewer than 480 milligrams of sodium and 30 or fewer grams of carbohydrates.

Dan Colgan, the St. Joseph superintendent, concedes it was not an easy decision. The vending contracts had provided St. Joseph schools with approximately $500,000 a year to help fund after-school activities, and the district needed the money. During the lead-up to a public vote on his district’s proposed $4.5 million operating budget in April 2004, Colgan decided to downplay any mention of the vending revenues. The ballot proposal included a $500,000 plan to change school food content, but it said nothing about the loss of revenues. When school nutrition was discussed, Colgan said he was a careful not to draw a line from vending machine profits to the operating budget unless someone specifically asked.

St. Joseph’s voters approved the additional funds, and the loss in vending revenues hasn’t been quite so painful, the superintendent says. The schools lost $35,000 in vending profits during the past school year and overall vending sales have dropped, according to Rick Hartigan, the district’s chief operating officer.

“We do have a revenue source now that supports the activity program in a way that offsets the loss of revenue with the bottling companies,” Hartigan says.

Acceptance of the new snack food offerings has proven to be another hurdle. At first, students threatened to boycott the new machines. Then some students tried to sabotage the plan by selling sodas themselves out of their car trunks.

Compromises were struck. Administrators allowed students to keep some of the soda machines for a limited period, and teens were consulted on the types of snacks to be included in the school’s vending machines, says Martha Meyer, the nutrition services director in St. Joseph.

“We’re making assaults on all fronts,” she adds. “I feel much more comfortable and accountable to the program now.”

The Everett, Wash., school board is putting dollars behind its pledge to promote good student health. The board told high school and middle school principals it would replace any money lost to reduced vending machine sales, this year transferring $97,000 from the general fund to student activity organizations at nine schools. Next year, the board will cover half the loss and then leave schools on their own.

The phase-in of nutritious snacks will give site administrators time to adapt. “We asked them to think about ways they could reduce so if they had a decline in revenue they could break even,” Everett Superintendent Carol Whitehead says.

Jim Dean, the principal of the 1,800-student Cascade High School, which received $29,000 from the board this year, told his staff to plan as though it didn’t have the soda funds. Out-of-town trips by the marching band were cut back. “Some of the track meets in eastern Washington we didn’t do this year,” he says. “Instead, we took ones closer to us here.”

He supports the vending changes. “It’s been enlightening for us how much we were giving kids that was not healthy for them–even how big our own portion sizes had gotten,” he adds.

Students at Dean’s school were given a say in the snack food changes. One group met with the district’s director of food services and several other administrators. “They asked very good questions, such as how did we get to this decision, and why did we decide to do it this way? The folks were able to tell them exactly why and what evidence they used,” Dean says.

No one really expects the school to recoup all the revenue it was earning before the snacks were upgraded. Student organizations are working with their advisers on fund raising.

“It’s one of those things where you become addicted to that income,” says Dean. “You should think of it as soft income, not hard income. But yet you do.”

A Pepsi Exclusive
Some school districts are working to change the negotiating climate to secure more lucrative contracts with vending distributors for noncarbonated drinks. The Los Angeles Unified School District recently signed what is probably the biggest contract so far for sales of non-sodas–$26 million from Pepsi. The deal for Pepsi’s exclusive distribution rights includes a $1.8 million signing bonus. Much of the revenues will benefit the district’s 49 high schools.

Over the summer, Pepsi stocked its school-based vending machines with nine products, including Gatorade Ice, juices, and plain, sparkling and flavored waters. That’s welcome news for principals, who have seen revenues from vending decrease by 26 percent since 2004, the year the district banned soda sales and required healthier vending snacks. At Carson High School, soda revenues dropped from $29,000 to $14,000 during the past year.

Gary Hemphill, managing director of Beverage Marketing, a national company, said beverage makers are poised to work with schools on their student health initiatives. Establishing brand loyalty is easier today because companies offer many products beyond sodas.

The American Beverage Association says demand for healthier products is being met, contending half of the contents of a typical school vending machine are non-carbonated beverages, said spokeswoman Kathleen Dezio.

Marlene Canter, a Los Angeles school board member who helped lead the campaign to change student eating habits, says it’s also possible to change the students’ attitudes. Teens at two high schools are learning from local business leaders about marketing their own healthier choices. They recently held taste tests with focus groups to select the products.

Representatives of a soy milk company visited one of the schools in L.A. “They gave away free samples,” Canter says. “Kids had never tasted it before. They liked it.”

Canter is optimistic about the future. “It’s never easy when you make changes. This shows you can do both.”

By: Sternberg, Ruth E., School Administrator, 10.2005