Sugar Over Substance or Selling Our Kids' Health

This article on not-so-nutritional school lunch programs that feature Yoo-Hoo, pre-made sandwiches in a bag and the sugar water that is Sunny-D exposes one of those fun little arguments over when it's ok to make money that I hadn't really thought of before. Silly socialists, if your kids are going to pony up $1.89 for french fries every day, the school district will make $500,000 to pay for the books that the government stopped giving you because the students are slow and can't pass the tests dictated by No Child Left Behind! Doesn't it all make perfect sense?
De L'article:

As government support has decreased, school food service programs face increasing pressure to be profitable -- a tall order when school lunches across the country cost an average of $1.54 in elementary schools and $1.77 in high schools.
A la carte offerings help do that. For instance, if Howard County adopts Maryland's new nutrition standards [which ban a la carte items with more than 9 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat and 15 grams of sugar], it will lose about $1.8 million in a la carte sales. In Arlington, the system makes $1.23 million a year from regular school lunches and $836,434 from a la carte sales.
"I'm not going to tell you that if we don't sell Yoo-hoo, we're bankrupt," [Dietitian Sandra] O'Connor said. But when adding up revenue, she said, "it does have a drastic effect."
Last year, when Arlington's secondary schools went from selling french fries a la carte every day to offering them three days a week, the system lost $150,000 in annual revenue.

Sad. We're selling our kids health. More so than usual.