Seattle Press on Line - Take Coca-Cola Out of Next Year's Master Schedule

Teacher Ted

Take Coca-Cola Out of Next Year's Master Schedule

By Ted Lockery

May 29, 2001 -- It's that time again, folks--time to finalize what you and the kids are doing once school's out (June 25th!). But while families are figuring out childcare and commuting schedules, faculty and staff throughout Seattle are already planning for next year.

Topping the agenda in most schools is the "master schedule." It typically involves a grid drawn on butcher paper with returning teachers' names heading columns that intersect rows of class periods, or "blocks," and is a great visual aid for figuring out who's teaching what next year.

The master schedule, however, is more than just a way to juggle time and space. It can be a chessboard upon which various personal and ideological power struggles are played out: who gets their planning time after lunch; which classes get longer vs. shorter blocks of time. Ideally, though, the master schedule is the visual representation of a school's collective reflection on "what worked well last year, and what didn't." And now is the perfect time to offer your suggestions, even if they don't occupy a box in the master schedule, before they get put off for another year.

For instance, you may have been waiting all year to suggest that your principal of choice actually enforce the food sales policy that requires vending machines--including those provided by the Coca-Cola Corporation's exclusive contract with Seattle Public Schools--to be inaccessible to students until the last lunch period is over.

"Too much trouble," you told yourself, visualizing the principal unplugging the machines each day. "Ineffective," you figured, imagining students plugging them back in. Well, I have news for you: Each Coke machine has a key that "deactivates" it without dimming the blaring, backlit, water-dropletted billboard. The deactivation butten doesn't even turn off the refrigeration unit that keeps those aluminum sugar capsules chilled to perfection (on our electricity bill).

Timing is everything--and while this may seem like the worst time to pop the question on questioning pop, this is the season when teachers and principals give themselves permission to envision how next year might look. Your suggestion that they start enforcing the school district's vending machine policy--short-sighted as that policy is--might resonate enough with their own best intentions to erase sugar- and caffeine-based products from schools.

Seize the moment, before this moment of opportunity seizes up!

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Anonymous	Dec 28, 2002
What! Tell your kid to not drink the pop and stop trying to tell others what they should be doing. I like pop and would be pissed if the machines were turned off. Plus if they turned the machines off they wouldn't make MONEY which is why they are there in the first place. The school benifits from that money coke gives them each year!