Junk Food Ban

On October 10, 2006 the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) voted to withdraw the filing prohibition on the School Food Service rules as amended by the Illinois State Board of Education. These rules will go into effect as soon as they are filed with the Secretary of State. JCAR obviously folded due to incredible pressure from the Governor who has been pushing this initiative since early last year when the Illinois Legislature refused to act on his bill to ban “junk food”. Since the Legislature would not act on this bill, the Governor invoked seldom used powers of ISBE to develop rules to circumvent the legislative process. The Legislature favored a more democratic process involving input from communities, schools, parents and nutritional experts. See text of the new rules at www.isbe.net/nutrition.


The rules that were adopted are somewhat better and more workable than those originally published, but will create many hardships for school lunch programs. Schools will be scrambling to implement these new rules in the coming months. Currently these rules only apply to students in grades K-8. The high schools have been left untouched at this time due to vendor contracts with soft drink manufacturers that would cause severe financial hardships.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in the area of nutrition since the amended rules will require ISBE to revisit nutrition standards contained in the new rules and begin a process to align them with those of the Illinois School Wellness Policy Task Force. The report of this task force is due in January of 2007. Preliminary information indicates that this report will attempt to enforce nutrition rules on lunches brought to school from home. The concept of the “Lunch Box Police” does not appeal to me! This is an example of political ambition and over regulation usurping the rights of local educational agencies and violating the concept of local control.