Sugar drinks banned

That was a few months ago, and while students are getting amped up again now that summer beckons, for a good while there, the classroom was a calmer, more focused place, said STEM teacher Jocelyn Paris.

In those early, crabby days, Paris told the students who threatened to protest that they needed to follow the proper channels, like they learned in social studies.

But no one did, and the new rule was used as a teachable moment in many ways. In her homeroom, students did some math and calculated they’d save $400 a year by nixing just a two-a-week habit of buying coffee drinks.

But Paris said for a large number of kids, it was a daily thing.

The idea for cutting the sugar and caffeine began percolating when administrators noticed students were regularly arriving late to school, said Principal Sandy Harris.

Not only that, every few weeks, they made messes of their drinks, in the halls and in lockers. “Sometimes they’d let the custodian know, sometimes they wouldn’t,” Harris said.

“There was a kid who had a locker full of ants because he had a spilled drink and food in there,” Paris said.

But really, it was about making healthier choices.

They warned students for several weeks that the ban was coming, and taught kids about the varied effects of sugar and caffeine, from cost to mess to impacts on the brain.

When kids protested, Paris told them every other school district she’d worked in also banned the drinks.

The upshot of the ban has been fewer tardy kids, less messes in the halls, and more water consumed.

Paris had her students do an experiment last year on the pH level of various substances. The most acidic rating on the pH scale, a 1, was hydrochloric acid, a substance so dangerous it will eat through skin.

Just slightly less acidic on the scale was a Monster Energy Drink, at like a 1.5 or a 2. “What does that do to a human body?” she asked. The human body is meant to be a neutral 7 on this scale, and water, as it happens, is right around a 7 too, Paris said.

“It was shocking to the kids the amount of acids or how they measured on the pH scale,” she said.

Right after the ban kicked in, Paris noticed students were “less jittery,” and there was less “mile a minute talking.”

The teen years are rough on a brain as it is. The prefrontal cortex, the seat of decision-making in the brain, undergoes chemical changes as it reforms itself to prepare for adulthood, Paris said.

“People say, ‘holy cow, they’ve lost their mind,’ and they really have, because the prefrontal cortex reverts back to when they were five,” she said.

They lose their ability to control their emotions, and inhibitions are gone. “It’s all scientifically proven, I’m not making this up,” she said.

Add sugar and caffeine to that brain scramble and “you’re really in for a hard time,” she said. “So you get that kid for one second they’re giggling and laughing and two seconds later they’re bawling and you say, ‘what happened?’ and they say, ‘I don’t know!’ And they don’t know.”

The scrambled-brain state won’t settle down in girls until they’re 17 to 21, and in boys until they’re 24 to 28, she said.

And it doesn’t just happen. You have to work at it, and learn to control your emotions. “Adding an outside substance just puts a variable in there that you don’t need,” she said.

Sugary, caffeinated drinks are a pressure thing, too. “It’s the cool thing to do,” Paris said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the view on the ban from the student side of things is a bit different.

Seventh grader Charlie May feels the ban is unnecessary. She felt students should have a choice to have the drinks, even if some drinks are unhealthy.

She also doesn’t think kids have sugar slumps.

She felt the only noticeable effect of the ban was more classroom disruption as students bickered with teachers about the ban, although that has mostly, but not entirely, died down.

She said kids still sneak the drinks in their backpacks, hidden in “un-clear water bottles.” Mostly what kids drink are beverages called “rebels” which are flavored Red Bulls, a type of high-sugar, high-caffeine energy drink.

She even did it herself once, but hasn’t again because it was “too much work.”

In the first week of the ban, one parent came to the school with several large sugary, caffeinated drinks for their daughter and her friends “and they were big ones and it was right in the beginning of the day and we were like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! Those are no longer allowed at school and we will put them in the freezer for after school,’” Harris recounted.

The first day of the ban, six kids brought in banned drinks, out of a student population of 600. They didn’t dump them or give them a referral. “It’s not a discipline thing, but [for] health,” Harris said.

They told students “we want to maintain our brain power all day long.”

Students were told about the sugar blues, or the lows that come awhile after having sugar. When students noted that grownups could still have caffeine and sugar, Harris said they were told that “grownups are mature enough not to be grouchy and they can still get stuff done.”

She said students have been “awesome about it,” and not a single parent has complained.

“It’s one less thing to say no to,” as a parent, Harris said.

She imagined some students may have even welcomed it. “They’re middle schoolers and image is everything and some of those kids might not even like the drinks but they like the cups and something yellow in it. It’s important to carry them around.

“It’s one of those ‘Let me help you not feel the peer pressure to spend money you don’t have to be someone you don’t want to be.’ That doesn’t necessarily come up, but human nature, I know kids that have broken cell phones, but they carry them around, because it’s about the image.”

She said this ban is “taking one thing away from what they have to deal with, but ultimately it’s about the well being and health of our school system.”