Bake Sale Ban

PETITION: A-812

FACTS
The new change in the Regulation of The Chancellor A-812 is supposed to make schools a healthier environment for students throughout New Yorks public school system. The reform prohibits the sale of non-approved items at any time between the time school begins and 6:00 PM." This means that only food made by companies with central contracts with the DOE can sell food in school. The reform was created in order to put a stop to obesity in public schools in New York City; a New York Times article cites that 40\% of elementary and middle school students are obese. This mainly affects students' extracurricular activities and sports, who can no longer use bake sales as a fundraising tool.

ARGUMENTS
After the economic crisis in 2008, schools have continually lost massive amounts of funding from the DOE. Any student in a public high school has seen the dramatic effects of the budget cuts first-hand. Many schools can no longer afford to keep their strongest extracurricular activities running. Bake sales help make up this difference; a successful bake sale can raise between $200 and $500. By cutting out this valuable revenue, the DOE is essentially cutting off extracurricular activities from any practical method of funding. The sale of t-shirts and other material goods has been suggested, but the profit margin is significantly smaller, particularly because most students do not carry around enough spare money in their pockets to buy a t-shirt in support of an extracurricular they do not take part in. The reform enforced by Bloomberg and the DOE is ignorant of many of the benefits of bake salesnot only do they raise funds for schools, but they also help build a community. Bake sales provide an excellent opportunity for students to learn how to manage a small business and work together with their fellow classmates. Students don't only buy from bake sales because they crave sweets during the day: more often than not, they spend their dollar knowing that it is going to a worthy activity in need of the money. The ban on bake sales destroys a huge source of school spirit without any major affect on students' eating habits. The reform cannot control what students buy outside of school. If they crave cookies, then they will buy cookies. Though the reform may have been created with good intentions, it ultimately is causing the deterioration of the activities that make students enjoy school.

SOLUTION
The new reform is detrimental in a multitude of ways to the school community, as outlined in the previous section. We the undersigned propose an alternative solution: the selling and purchasing of food from student organizations be permitted during school hours, but each item must be displayed with an ingredients card. This card will list, in agreement with its name, the ingredients in the food and the number of servings produced. If 1/4 cup or more of an ingredient is used, it would be listed in bold. This is a practical approach to listing calories for baked goods, as it is nearly impossible to gauge the number of calories in a homemade product. It allows students to determine for themselves whether or not a food is too unhealthy for them to eat, without denying extracurricular activities their desperately needed fundraisers.

Please help us petition A-812