West Virginia’s Department of Education has rescinded a statewide embargo which has prevented kids from bringing cupcakes and other sweets for various classroom celebrations.
State bureaucrats instituted the ban on food that isn’t nutritious back in 2012, during the height of the Obama administration’s attack on calories and sugar in food consumed at taxpayer-funded schools.
Now, officials in individual school districts in West Virginia will be able to decide which foods to ban and which foods to allow in local schools, reports the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
Cindy Daniel, West Virginia’s deputy superintendent of schools, noted that the ban on sweets originated as guidelines from the state agency. The guidelines acted as a de facto statewide ban, however, because no local superintendent was going to risk the consequences of bucking the guidelines of bureaucrats in Charleston.
“Until such time that Policy 4321.1 is revised and additional guidance is given, county superintendents have the discretion to work with their staffs to determine the guidelines for classroom celebrations,” a draft of the new state guidance on school nutrition reads, according to the Gazette-Mail.
West Virginia’s state superintendent of schools, Michael Martirano, was more blunt.
“You have permission to have fun,” Martirano said at a state Board of Education meeting earlier this month.
State departments of education and local school boards across America outlawed cupcakes and all manner of other delicious treats from school grounds for several years because they wanted federal money under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act must. Under that law, a set of Smart Snacks standards created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture has stringently limited the number of calories and the amount of sugar, fat and sodium in every morsel of food sold at schools for over 30 million American school kids.
Federal intervention famously put a stop to a velvety, cake-like, scrumptious delicacy glazed with a huge dollop of sugary pink icing that was arguably the best cafeteria cookie in the world. (RELATED: Now Michelle Obama Has Caused America’s ‘Best Cafeteria Cookie’ To Be Outlawed)
Federal wellness guidelines were never particularly popular with America’s parents or America’s kids. Kentucky Students To First Lady Michelle Obama: Your Food ‘Tastes Like Vomit’
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