By Tanner Willson, Pinnacle Canyon Academy Journalism Student
Last year at Pinnacle, students were given the privilege to have soda machines. Now, in the 2014 school year, they were taken away. Many thoughts have been brought up about why they were taken, but not many students have known why, until now.
In the Healthy Schools Initiative, there were mandates placed as to what could actually be sold in schools. One thing that Pinnacle will bring back is the water machine, which was broken and will be replaced. One main problem with the machines is that they break very often. Then, in the time that it took to fix them, the school got no money from them.
The soda machines were not very profitable. “We sold them for $1 and they cost about $0.75 each,” student government teacher Mindy Bradbury indicated. So, with this knowledge, Pinnacle didn’t really get much money from them. Also, the Pepsi machine didn’t have regular soda, it was filled with diet. Not very many people, including Bradbury, liked it for that reason.
Many people have wanted to bring the pop machines back, including Pinnacle’s principal Roberta Hardy. “I would love to bring back soda machines, but then the school would be in trouble with the state legislature,” Hardy stated.
Hardy and Bradbury both said that the main problem is that the machines always took people’s money and didn’t give them their soda.
Essentially, having the soda machines in the school would break Utah’s regulations about having soda or sugars in school. Many want to bring them back, but according to Utah’s laws, Pinnacle is not legally allowed to bring them back.