Reply #70: You don't recall halloween scares with tainted apples? [View All]

[Ms. Toad]

(poisoned and/or razor blades)

I agree her motives were noble - and the punishment stupid because the school should not have been focused on maintaining the profitability of the food service. That said, for safety reasons you can't pick and choose people allowed to run a vending operation in school based on what you presume their motives to be.

In addition, the health services have documentation regarding any health-related dietary restrictions. If that teacher had sold food to a student who was not permitted to eat that particular kind of food the consequences could have been disastrous (think peanut butter contamination and life threatening peanut allergies, as the most obvious example).

Anyone selling food in schools (aside from authorized club fundraisers) has a contract which makes them liable if there are food safety issues - she had no contract addressing that activity. It is much easier to get compensation when the contractor has agreed up front to be liable for anything that goes wrong rather than trying to prove fault after the fact.

A more appropriate punishment would have been to put her to work creating a plan to add more healthy foods to the food service selection, how to encourage students to make better selections from what is there, or even writing a paper about compliance with health department regulations for sale of foods.