Primary School Girl Told To Stop Photographing and Blogging School Meals 472
JamieKitson writes "British primary school (elementary to those of you in the U.S.) pupil Martha/'Veg' has been taking photographs of her school dinners and writing about them at her blog Never Seconds since April. The blog has become popular, and Martha decided to do something with the popularity: namely, raising money for an international school dinners charity. Unfortunately, the local council, Argyll and Bute, having apparently not heard of the Streisand effect, didn't like the publicity that her blog was generating and have shut her down. They said the blog made the catering staff fear for their jobs. There is a happy ending though: donations have gone through the roof and she has already passed her target."
Re:When will they learn (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yes and no. How much do we hear about people in prison in China for political "crimes".
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
That's good news. I wondered why they told this girl to stop in the first place because the food she photographed actually looks both healthy and tasty, so what was the problem?
Bad publicity? (Score:5, Insightful)
The public have a fundamental right to see what their tax dollars (or pounds in this case) are doing, whether that is detailed information about Afghanistan and Iraq or school lunches.
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
More transparency is always a good thing.
Re:did the 3rd party catering / food service push (Score:3, Insightful)
OK too lazy to look up that blog, but if the meal providers are afraid of their jobs, then I'd say that implies they know their food is of poor quality.
All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.
Re:When will they learn (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:summary error... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody else reads the articles, why would you expect the person who wrote the summary to have read it??
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
If this girl had been here in the U.S., she'd probably already be charged with some form of terrorism by DHS and thrown in a cell with murderers, rapists, and people that upload HD rips of hit movies to the internet.
C'mon dude, you made a lot of good points, why did you have to spoil it with outrageous hyperbole? It's one of the most obvious rules of trying to prove a point - people judge your argument as a whole, so if you throw in a crapton of obvious nonsense, people don't take the good parts seriously.
Re:Calling for roadside assistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the same thing I did in the days before ubiquitous mobile devices: walk.
metal utensiles, including knives (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it refreshing that she's given actual, metal utensils, including a knife.
I'm 30 now, so you can use that for a frame of reference. Back in elementary school, we were also given metal utensils, including knives. somewhere around middle school/high school (I think it was when I was entering high school), Minnesota passed a zero tolerance knife policy for the grade schools. Now, even a butter knife would get you immediately expelled from school, the cafeteria switched to plastic-ware and no longer had even plastic knives.
I'm glad to see that not everyone is insane.
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the British authorities shouldn't be forced to work with a "looking over your shoulder" effect on them. That situation is very stressful and will make you paranoid. I'm glad the British authorities understand the awful stress of constantly being monitored and surveilled.
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations on growing up middle class. Many kids, especially inner city kids, don't have responsible parents to pack their lunch for them, let alone the money to buy twinkies or fruit-roll-ups. Many schools in the US also serve breakfast, and many kids qualify to receive both for free.
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
School lunches are a surprisingly powerful tool against malnourished kids in deprived areas. Getting a decent meal into deprived children is both good for their general health and for their ability to absorb the education the school is offering. Therefore it is a policy aim that all schools be able to offer a quality meal to any deprived children in the area (since deprivation occurs in wealthy areas as well as poor). In fact, the percentage of children entitled to such meals for free is used as a metric of the school's intake, those with a higher level of free lunches being assumed to have a less well supported intake. Given that such a meal must be offered to those entitled to it free, it makes economic sense to offer it to all children. It doesn't stop children bringing their own lunches to school as you describe, and many do. In my experience in comfortably off areas, about half of all children bring their own lunches and half have school lunches.
Re:U turn (Score:2, Insightful)
Freedom is dead.
Your post was interesting and useful until that bit. Why include that hyperbolic crap? What did it add (except for making you seem like a crackpot)?
Re:U turn (Score:5, Insightful)
Not saying banning the girl's camera was a good move or that something productive could not come from scrutiny, just saying I could see why they would be worried even if they had done nothing wrong/bad/poor.
Protip - If you have a problem with the general public scrutinizing your every action at work, don't work for the general public.
Re:U turn (Score:4, Insightful)
Our campus was totally closed, although the degree with which it was closed changed a lot over my 4 years there. When I first started going there, there were portables [wikipedia.org] that were adjacent to the student parking lots, and the teachers stationed in those portables would watch out the windows for students trying to leave school grounds...but generally you could slip out if you were super-sneaky about it, although it sometimes required Mission: Impossible style coordination with students in those particular portables at a given period to act as a distraction to the teachers inside, who could just look up out the window and see the bulk of the lot from their desk.
Towards the end of my high-school career, though, they'd finally had it with kids like us getting off campus and started posting security guards out there, and a year or so after I left (when Columbine happened) they graduated up to a toll-booth style checkpoint with a permanent security guard and checked the badges of everyone entering and leaving campus. Our school was surrounded by woods on 3 sides so a lot of kids used to just park off-campus and sneak through the woods instead, but I've heard from a few people I went to school with that stayed in the area after graduation they've completely fenced in the grounds and removed a lot of the brush since I was last there almost 20 years ago to make this more difficult.
It's really shocking how much different the vibe is at school these days. I wouldn't want to be a student in today's public schools, that's for sure...I'd probably have been arrested a dozen times already for the shit we used to pull when we were in school, and it's not like I'm talking about the distant past or anything, I'm talking mid-90's here.
Re:U turn (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the richest and the most powerful country in the world after all.
Re:incompetent or poor ingredients / equipment / t (Score:5, Insightful)
>which means that somebody needs to be fired.
Why is it that the answer to everything seems to be to fire someone?
If the cafeteria equipment is sub-par, why can't the person in charge simply be told to get better equipment instead of being fired?
Is this a common approach to problem solving in most companies?
Bug tracker not easy to use? Fire someone.
Windows has an occasional crash? Fire somebody.
There was a brownout and you didn't have enough diesel for the backup generators? Fire the whole IT dept.
Re:U turn (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to tell you this but there is no such thing as "free". When I was young you were supposed to support your family and that meant feeding them. I fed my kids and I resent having to feed other people kids. There used to be a thing in society called responsibility. That meant you were responsible for you and your's. That free healthcare and free meals you allude to are paid for by taking money away from me and mine.
That's a pretty sickening attitude. Really, society only survives because thankfully not everyone thinks the way you do.