OPINION: Stop serving caffeinated beverages in school

When you hop into the lunch line at New Providence Middle/High School, you’ll be greeted by pastas, burgers, and other pretty mediocre fast food which isn’t that bad. Then we get to the beverage fridge nearing the end of this line. A little grocery store style fridge where you can just grab things out of it without a door. In here, contains the main subject of this opinion piece: countless beverages, both caffeinated and not. Water, Smart Water, Coke, Coke Zero, random flavors of Dr. Pepper, and you can’t forget the Mountain Dew Kickstart energy drink and Dunkin’ Donuts Girl Scouts cookie flavored coffee. Most of these beverages include caffeine with some even containing high amounts and are branded as an energy drink. The very fact that these are sold at a school should alarm you. Caffeine is a drug and stimulant just like some other very potent ones like cocaine, and thus, has side effects and the ability of you to get addicted to it. Although I might sound like a fun hating boomer, side effects of caffeine include insomnia, shakiness, headaches, and much more. Nonetheless, our school still sells these beverages and even participates in Red Ribbon Week, bringing awareness to the dangers of drugs and that they’re really bad and uncool while pedaling drugs in their very own cafeteria. If a caffeine addiction at a young age isn’t alarming enough for you, then the very fact that these beverages are sold at a school in the first place should. The only reason why you’d consume caffeine is if you’re looking to stay awake for a little longer or if you haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before. Sleep deprivation is extremely common for teens due to the fact that their bodies can’t produce melatonin until around 11:00 PM. This makes it extremely hard to get those sweet, precious, 8 hours of sleep that you basically need within the time span of 11:00 PM and when school starts at 7:55 AM for the middle school and 7:45 for the high school. Instead of say, pushing the starting time of school back until a more reasonable time, the school district just throws energy drinks at the problem and hopes it goes away. The problem of sleep depravation isn’t something you can just ignore and the fact that school lunches are branded as “healthy” whilst providing overpriced bubbly sugar water to glug down your throat hole is a very large issue that people appear to be ignoring.