yeah! bring it in! all of it!

Rick Nichols, in the Inquirer's Food section, thinks it's a great idea to give Coke or Pepsi exclusive vending contracts in public schools. In fact, he says, why stop there?

I know of no legal restraint, for instance, against schools' partnering with furniture, apparel and drug companies that stand to benefit from the district's work... Other avenues come to mind. Lifting the archaic bans on alcohol and cigarette sales are two.

His slippery slope goes a bit beyond funny, but his point is a good one. If schools become concerned with profit, the quality of education is necessarily going to suffer. Schools are not businesses. To treat them as such is ensure that some schools, and therefore students, are going to lose out. To shamelessly quote the entirely fictional Sam Seaborn, "Schools should be cathedrals." But the money shouldn't come at the price of forcing goods upon a captive market.