On September 18, 2003, Governor Gray Davis signed into law the California Childhood Obesity Prevention Act, which effectively bans soda sales in public elementary, middle and junior high school campuses after July 1, 2004 (Los Angeles Business Journal, 2003, n.p.). Even before that, however, the Board members of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted in August 2002 to ban sales of carbonated sodas in all of the district's 677 elementary, middle and high schools (Associated Press, 2002, n.p.). The ban will go into effect in January 2004.
The LAUSD ban was co-authored by board members Julie Korenstein and Marlene Canter. Korenstein stated that the ban was needed to fight obesity among students (Associated Press, 2002, n.p.). According to the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, 40 percent of California's children are physically unfit, and more than 25 percent are overweight, (Shire, 2003, n.p.). Board Member Canter added that "[i]f we're going to be successful in closing the achievement gap and raising student achievement, we need to focus on the whole child" (Robertson & Walter, 2002, p. 1).
Jacqueline Domac is a health teacher at Venice High School in Los Angeles and a former site coordinator for California Project LEAN Food on the Run who was instrumental in instituting an early ban on soda sales at Venice High. Ms. Domac stated that she argued to the LAUSD board that "they take the lead in promoting better health on campus for the state, and in turn, for the nation," state Ms. Domac said (Robertson & Walter, 2002, p. 1). Today, many schools in California and across the nation have instituted some form of soda ban on their campuses. If such bans are to be truly effective, however, they must have the commitment of education administrators and they must be part of a larger district-wide program aimed at improving the nutritional value of food available on school campuses.
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