With PC Pro Schools college tuition stay low and affordable for everyone but with other college tuition fees being at a record high, dropping out during a course isn’t something to be done lightly. It will affect the rest of your life, and can drastically impact your earning potential for the future. Unless you’re financially independent or an entrepreneur with a winning invention, dropping out of college is never a good idea.

Money

The most common reason students drop out of college is money. College tuition isn’t cheap, and even if you have parents to help, living costs are rising all the time. There are financial aid schemes for students in trouble, but it isn’t always the answer.

Students should never just drop out without discussing the issue with their parents, or the college.

Paid Work

This reason is related to the first really. Many students need to take on a job as well as study to survive. Whether it’s to pay for college tuition, accommodation or the beer at weekends, it all takes a toll. Working 20 hours a week as well as full-time study wears you down and can break you.

It’s a significant contributor to dropouts throughout the country. Again, students shouldn’t drop out over work commitments without speaking to the PC Pro School Admin, or parents first. There are always answers to problems, and it isn’t always the most obvious one that’s best.

Unprepared

College isn’t something you just drop into on a whim. It takes work, interviews, preparation and a lot of paperwork to get into a good school. College tuition isn’t cheap, so provisions have to be made long in advance to cover fees and living costs for your time there.

Sometimes, students just aren’t prepared for living away from home, looking after themselves, the expense, or the workload of some courses. As a PC Pro School freshman, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with this new way of life and the new responsibilities you have inherited.

Homesickness

It was mentioned above, but homesickness is one of the biggest contributors to college dropouts in the country. It may sound silly, but many people have trouble adjusting to life outside their town, or home. College counselors across the country are dealing with these cases more and more.

It’s more than a simple missing mommy moment, it’s about the whole experience of being away from the safety of everything you have ever known. Some people embrace it, others can’t handle it.

Sickness or Injury

This is another significant factor in dropout numbers. Students who play sports, or undertake extreme activities stand a high risk of this. Sickness and injury can cause students to miss class time, and eventually drop out of it gets severe enough.

Many colleges like PC Pro Schools can make arrangements to accommodate sick students if they want to continue learning so it’s always worth talking to the school about it.

College tuition is a privilege and should be viewed as such. That means giving it your very best effort to get through it and survive. It isn’t all about the learning, the “college experience” is all about teaching you how to live and work with people, how to interact, and how to juggle competing priorities. All these are valuable lessons you’re going to need to learn at some point.

In return, the teacher was kicked out of Howell High School in Michigan for a day — suspended without pay for violating the student’s free speech rights.

The incident has sparked intense debate in Howell, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) northwest of Detroit, over defending civil rights without trampling the U.S. constitution’s right to free speech. It’s gained far wider attention since a local newspaper released video of a 14-year-old gay student from another city defending McDowell at a Howell school board meeting.

On Oct. 20, McDowell told a student in his classroom to remove a belt buckle with the Confederate flag, the symbol of the southern confederacy that seceded from the United States over slavery, kicking off the Civil War in the 1860s.

She complied, but it prompted a question from a boy about how the flag differs from the rainbow flag, a symbol of pride for the gay community.

“I explained the difference between the flags, and he said, ‘I don’t accept gays,’” said McDowell, 42, who was wearing a shirt with an anti-gay bullying message.

McDowell said he told the student he couldn’t say that in class.

“And he said, ‘Why? I don’t accept gays. It’s against my religion.’ I reiterated that it’s not appropriate to say something like that in class,” McDowell said Monday.

McDowell said he sent the boy out of the room for a one-day class suspension. Another boy asked if he also could leave because he also didn’t accept gays.

“The classroom discussion was heading in a direction I didn’t want it to head,” McDowell said.

McDowell soon received a reprimand letter from the district that said his actions violated the students’ free speech rights as well as school policy. It also said he “purposefully initiated a controversial issue” by wearing the T-shirt featuring the anti-gay bullying message.

“I thought it was a really great, teachable moment,” McDowell said of his decision to remove the student from class.

Graeme Taylor is among those who agree. The 14-year-old, who does not go to Howell schools, says he is gay and attended a recent school board meeting to praise a teacher who “finally stood up and said something.”

“I’ve been in classrooms where children have said the worst things,” the boy told the board. “The kinds of things that drove me to a suicide attempt when I was 9 years old.”

Video of Graeme’s comments had been viewed on YouTube more than 13,000 times as of Monday evening, when Howell schools held a community diversity forum that district spokeswoman Kim Root said was meant to be a step forward.

“We can learn some things from this episode,” she said, adding the district hoped to receive recommendations from the public to improve “the tolerance of the district and enhance diversity efforts we already have in place.”

Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) Legal Project, credits McDowell for trying to create a “welcoming environment for all students.” But Kaplan said the “teachable moment” would have come if the students stayed in the classroom.

“We believe, based on those statements — as offensive and upsetting as they were — they were protected speech,” Kaplan said. “The only way we’re going to create a better environment in schools is to start talking about this.”

Kaplan said Howell schools have expressed interest in accepting the ACLU‘s offer to provide in-person training to students, faculty and staff. He said such training could provide a better understanding of what can be said and done.

McDowell has filed a complaint against the district over the discipline he received, but said Monday he primarily wants to “force the school to look at itself.”

“I want to force adults to look at what situation we’ve created,” he said. “I would really like us to be more aggressive in our policing of harassing and bullying.”

Michigan teacher suspended over anti-gay punishment

The American Civil Liberties Union believes the lawsuit is the first in the country over a school’s ban on the bracelets, which are designed to raise breast-cancer awareness among young people. The rubber jewelry has become wildly popular among students, prompting bans across the country.

School officials in Easton argue that the slogan is distracting and demeaning, and that some staff feel it trivializes a serious illness.

The district banned the bracelets in October, a month into the school year and after students had been wearing them without serious incident, the ACLU said.

The two girls had their parents’ permission to wear the bracelets but soon found themselves in the principal’s office at Easton Area Middle School, the lawsuit states. They were also banned from school dances for a month.

Amy Martinez said her daughter Kayla’s suspension seems unduly harsh, given that the 12-year-old had agreed to wear the bracelet inside out, with only a breast cancer-awareness website address showing. That, too, was deemed inappropriate under the school dress code, she said.

“I don’t believe that vulgarity, obscenity, profanity or nudity (in the school code) apply to the word ‘boobies’ or ‘breast,’” said Martinez, an accountant whose late aunt suffered from breast cancer.

“There were teachers that had ‘breast cancer awareness’ T-shirts on” in October, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she said.

The ACLU calls the bracelets perhaps silly and irreverent, but not lewd or indecent.

“The First Amendment does not allow schools to censor students’ speech merely because some students and teachers are offended by the non-vulgar educational message, and silencing the speakers because other students may react inappropriately would amount to a constitutionally impermissible heckler’s veto,” the ACLU said in the suit.

“Seeing a bracelet with ‘I Love Boobies!’ on it is a conversation starter that leads to discussion and awareness of issues affecting young people,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in Philadelphia on behalf of Martinez and Jennifer Hawk, the mother of an eighth-grader. The two girls are friends, Martinez said. Kayla Martinez continues to wear the bracelet to school under her sleeve, her mother said.

The suit asks the district to end the ban, allow the girls to attend all school functions and expunge their disciplinary records.

Easton’s superintendent did not immediately return a call for comment.

In discussions between the two sides before the lawsuit was filed, district officials complained the bracelets made some people uncomfortable and had prompted some boys to make inappropriate comments, the suit said.

“I don’t know … why the educators are not equipped to deal with distractions. Why do they have to ban, ban, ban?” Martinez said.

Schools from Florida to California have banned the bracelets.

The rubber jewelry is sold by the Carlsbad, Calif.-based nonprofit Keep A Breast Foundation to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer organizations.

Moms sue Pa. school over ‘boobies’-bracelet ban

Thirty presidents received more than $1 million in pay and benefits in 2008, according to an analysis of federal tax forms by The Chronicle of Higher Education. More than 1 in 5 chief executives at the 448 institutions surveyed topped $600,000.

Most of the pay packages were negotiated before the full force of the recession. But even if the numbers dip slightly in next year’s survey, executive pay is expected to keep climbing over the long term as colleges compete for top talent. And schools are rewarding executives while raising tuition, exposing themselves to criticism.

At large research universities, the median pay was $760,774; it was $387,923 at liberal arts colleges and $352,257 at undergraduate and graduate colleges and universities.

The highest paid executive in the Chronicle survey was Bernard Lander, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and sociologist who founded Touro College in New York in 1970. He died in February at 94.

Lander received a compensation package of nearly $4.8 million. In a statement, the college said $4.2 million of that was retroactive pay and benefits awarded after an outside consultant determined Lander had been “severely underpaid.”

Several deals reported the Chronicle survey, which covers the most recent available data, included deferred compensation or other unusual circumstances. Comparisons to past years aren’t possible because of changes in how data is reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Colleges were asked to report salaries by calendar year instead of fiscal year as in the past, so most dollar amounts overlap with what was reported the previous year.

Another change: Perks including first-class air travel, country club dues and housing are now included in reported pay.

In 2007-2008, 23 presidents received more than $1 million. As recently as 2004, no college president had broken the seven-figure threshold.

While some presidents on the latest list lead ultra-selective schools such as Columbia, Yale and Penn, executives from schools such as the University of Tulsa and Chapman University in Orange, Calif., are on it, too.

Not all the most elite schools are represented, either. The presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Johns Hopkins all were paid in the $800,000s.

“Value is in the eyes of the beholder,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of the Chronicle. “Some boards think these presidents, even at small institutions, are worth it. On the flip side, the prestige of serving at other institutions is enough of a paycheck for some.”

Still, numbers in the tax forms don’t always tell the whole story.

Chapman University President James Doti’s $1.25 million compensation includes two “golden handcuff” deferred compensation deals worth almost $665,000, spokeswoman Mary Platt said. She said the board did not want to lose Doti, who since taking the job in 1991 has raised the school’s profile and overseen expansive building projects.

He and other college presidents have donated a portion of the earnings back to the college. Doti gave a $1 million gift for an endowed chair in economics.

David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a statement that salaries reflect supply and demand, and that presidents’ jobs have become more demanding. Presidential salaries make up a very small percentage of campus budgets and have virtually no impact on tuition increases, Warren said.

Still, public confidence in higher education erodes when tuition and presidential pay are both rising, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“People see higher education as another institution that takes care of the people at the top first,” he said.

According to the College Board, average tuition and fees at private colleges and universities have risen almost 35% in the past decade, to $27,290. Many students, though, pay much less because of grants and tax benefits. The average net price at private schools was $11,320 this fall, less than what students paid on average a decade ago.

Public college presidents generally earn less than their private counterparts. Only one public university president topped $1 million in 2008-09 —Ohio State University president Gordon Gee brought in $1.5 million.

Then there are for-profit colleges, which are under fire for their heavy reliance on federal student aid money and high student loan default rates. Strayer Education Inc. paid chairman and CEO Robert Silberman $41.9 million last year, according to a Bloomberg report last week.

Survey: More college presidents make millions

Hearst Magazines chairwoman Cathie Black will become the first female chancellor of the city’s 1.1 million-student school system, replacing Joel I. Klein, who has served as chancellor since 2002. Klein is leaving to become an executive vice president at News Corp.

Bloomberg praised Black, a Chicago native who spent eight years at USA Today as president, publisher, board member and Gannett Co. executive vice president, as a “world-class manager.” The billionaire mayor, who often eschews traditional resumes for government posts, said Black’s business skills make her an ideal leader of educators and students.

“She understands that we have to make sure that our kids have the skill sets to partake in the great American dream,” Bloomberg said. “In the end, I picked somebody who I have confidence is the right person for this job at this time.”

The appointment will require a waiver from the state Department of Education because Black is not a certified teacher. The mayor said Klein will stay on until the end of the year.

Black attended parochial schools in Chicago and sent her own children to private boarding schools in Connecticut.

She has been on Fortune magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” list and is the author of a book called “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” She will be the first woman to lead the New York City school system.

At Hearst, she oversees titles including Esquire; Good Housekeeping; O, the Oprah magazine and Popular Mechanics.

Black’s appointment reflects Bloomberg’s view that success in business translates to similar achievements in public service.

“There is no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy,” Bloomberg said at a City Hall news conference with Klein and Black.

Before Klein joined the Bloomberg administration, he was with media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG. Previously, he was an assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration. He headed the U.S. Justice Department‘s antitrust division for nearly four years, where his work included launching the case to break up Microsoft Corp.

Unlike Black, Klein grew up in New York City and attended public schools.

As chancellor, he often clashed with unions and with parent groups that complained of being denied a role in running the schools.

“Many parents will be glad to see Joel Klein leave as chancellor, who had no respect for their views or priorities,” said Leonie Haimson, who leads a parent advocacy group called Class Size Matters.

Ernest Logan, the president of the union that represents New York City principals, said Klein “had a rocky road” as chancellor but learned on the job.

Logan said he knows little about Black. “I’m now going to read her book,” he said.

Teachers union head Michael Mulgrew said: “I look forward to working with Ms. Black. As a teacher, I will help in any way I can to improve the education for the children of New York.”

Black told reporters she has had “limited exposure to unions” in her previous jobs.

Klein was appointed chancellor after Bloomberg won control of the school system and disbanded the Board of Education. Bloomberg and Klein have touted the progress that students have made under their watch, but the state Education Department said last summer that rising scores on standardized tests had been overstated because the tests had become too easy.

Black will likely serve no longer than the three years remaining in Bloomberg’s term.

“She’s had a career, so maybe she can have the ability to devote the next three years to public service,” Bloomberg said.

Publishing exec named new NYC schools chancellor

On Oct. 2, a raid by New Haven, Conn., police to break up a party by Yale University students led to claims of police brutality and excessive force.

One week later, a party by Penn State University students turned violent when a fight between two women spilled out onto the streets of State College, leaving two students with stab wounds.

Last week, Pace University football player Danroy “DJ” Henry was shot and killed by police outside a popular eatery frequented by students from the nearby Pace campus.

What they have in common is alcohol — a common component in encounters between police and college students that can fuel tensions.

“Obviously you’re going to have some standard issues,” said Eugene O’Donnell, professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You’re going to have issues about later-night activity. You’re going to have alcohol-related issues.”

The violence outside Finnegan’s Grill in Thornwood, N.Y., came after a celebration of the school’s homecoming game, attended by about 150 people including students and members of the football team. The crowd spilled into the parking lot after 1 a.m. after a fight inside the bar. On Friday, a law enforcement source told The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News that Henry had a blood-alcohol level of 0.13%, exceeding the legal limit of 0.08%.

It was hardly the first run-in between police and Pace students. In November 2000, several students were among eight men who trashed a campus townhouse in retaliation for an earlier fight at a local bar.

And on April 25, 2008, a 21-year-old student was charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend in her dorm room during a drunken rampage.

“Pace is like a little city unto itself, and they do require police resources,” said Mount Pleasant (N.Y.) Police Chief Louis Alagno. “We’re called there mostly for things such as motor vehicle accidents and aided cases, but we also respond for criminal incidents. There are burglaries, larcenies and the occasional sex crime or assault. It does require police resources.”

You don’t have to tell police in New Rochelle, N.Y., a city with three colleges — College of New Rochelle, Iona College and Monroe College.

“We’ll have pockets of disturbances,” said New Rochelle police Capt. Robert Gazzola, head of the department’s police services division. “I don’t think there’s any lasting animosity between the police department, the Iona College students, the Monroe College students. A lot of it is isolated incidents that perk up and we have to respond.”

The city, plagued for years by rowdy behavior in local bars tackled the problem years ago by passing a stricter “cabaret law” that allowed police to go after and target troublesome bars.

Police in Mount Pleasant and Pleasantville, where most Pace watering holes are located, have enforced underage drinking laws for years — a common tactic in college towns.

But the bar at the center of a fatal shooting had no recent history of problems involving students, according to state and local law enforcement.

Finnegan’s seemed an unlikely place for a violent encounter between police and celebrating college students last weekend.

Pace students interviewed by The Journal News said they generally had not had negative encounters with local police. Some went so far as to say they were shocked to hear of the violence outside Finnegan’s last weekend.

“I wouldn’t say they’re aggressive, they’re just doing their job,” said student John Tripodi. “I guess what they did (outside Finnegan’s) was a little excessive, but if I was him I don’t know what I would have done.”

But Megan Murphy, a freshman accounting major at the Mount Pleasant college, called the police account of the shooting “ridiculous.”

“It’s all too iffy right now. I’m not sure,” Murphy said. “I wasn’t there so I can’t say what exactly happened. (Henry) probably just panicked.”

Alcohol fuels tensions between college students, police

With the Ohio Department of Education looking on, the Mississinawa Valley Schools in Darke County will try to replace days off for snow and other inclement weather with online learning.

Department officials say the test could help the state determine the future of calamity days.

School districts are allowed to declare only three this year, down from the previous five. Schools that go over must make up the days on scheduled days off or at the end of the school year.

Mississinawa Superintendent Lisa Wendel told The Columbus Dispatch the experience in online education will help students in college, where those classes are more common.

Some snowed-in Ohio students to learn online

Federal investigators are in the process of visiting all of Christina’s schools and have requested detailed discipline data for at least the last two academic years.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan first mentioned districts were being investigated at a conference in late September hosted by the Department of Education’s civil rights office and the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Besides Delaware, the school districts under review are in New York, North Carolina, Utah and Minnesota.

One of the other districts, the San Juan School District in rural Utah, is being investigated for alleged gender disparities without respect to race or ethnicity, according to a school official.

Christina district officials acknowledged that a disparity exists in the discipline rates for black male students that they are working to correct, according to district spokeswoman Wendy Lapham. She added that the district has been cooperating with the federal investigation.

Statewide, black students made up about 32% of the public school population last year, but they accounted for about 55% of students who were suspended or expelled, according to an analysis by The News Journal published in June that compared discipline statistics provided by the state to school enrollments.

The discipline rates for all students in Delaware are higher than the national average: 21,690 of the state’s 126,801 students — about one in six — were suspended or expelled in the 2009-2010 school year, which is down slightly from the year before. Those numbers include in-school suspensions. Counting only expulsions and out-of-school suspensions, the number dips to 14,368 students, or about one in nine.

The Christina School District had the highest rate among the state’s 19 school districts in the 2008-2009 and the 2007-2008 school years. However, the district’s numbers went down in almost every school in 2009-2010.

Lapham said the decrease is the result of an effort to better train teachers, help students learn to deal with conflicts and the elimination of a zero-tolerance policy.

She said the district has been analyzing its data internally and has been “working to address any issues of disparity by working with teachers at the classroom level, increasing training for para-professionals, reviewing and discussing data at the school level and significantly reducing suspensions and expulsions.”

In 2009, a 6-year-old boy brought a Boy Scout tool to a Christina school to eat his pudding at lunch. Under the district’s zero-tolerance policy, the boy faced a punishment of suspension or expulsion. The policy did not allow educators to make a punishment judgment call based on the context of the incident or age of the child.

But after public outcry and widespread media attention, the school board decided to amend its policy as it pertained to kindergarten and first-grade students.

Parents and officials point to that outcome when they complained about Christina’s high rate of punishment among black males. The 6-year-old was white.

Wanda Stanley said she read about the boy’s case with interest because her 11-year-old daughter was expelled after a box cutter fell out of her jacket pocket at Pulaski Elementary School in Wilmington. The girl did not know how the box cutter got in her pocket and had no intention of hurting anyone, her mother said. Police were notified by the school but did not file charges.

School officials told her there was no room for debate about the expulsion because of the district’s zero-tolerance policy, Stanley said. From her perspective, Stanley saw that a white boy went unpunished while her black daughter was put out of school.

“I am hurt because I know my daughter is totally innocent and I don’t want this to follow my daughter through her schooling,” Stanley said.

The district and state boards of education ruled that the expulsion was justified. The district’s board amended the zero-tolerance policy further last school year.

A complaint against the school board is pending before the state Human Relations Commission, alleging that the district discriminated against Stanley’s daughter on the basis of age and race.

Studies show that minorities are punished at higher rates than their peers, but there’s not evidence that these children misbehave more, said Dan Losen, a former teacher who now works for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. The government under President George W. Bush did not investigate many schools for these issues, which are now getting attention under the Obama administration, he said.

Typically, reviews from the office of civil rights are used to help districts find solutions and to monitor progress, Losen said, because “the preference has historically been to enter into a joint problem-solving approach rather than issuing violations.”

Helen Spacht, principal at Christina’s Wilson Elementary, said programs like the district’s Day of Caring help reinforce the importance of kindness and how to treat others with respect. The school is certified under the Anti-Defamation League‘s No Place for Hate program, which means staff and students have undergone training on diversity issues. Also, teachers have been meeting to share ideas and literature on better classroom and bullying management, she said.

“It’s really changing the strategies and how they work with students,” she said.

But the district has not made enough progress in dealing with these issues, said New Castle Councilman Jea Street, who organized a rally in April to protest the discipline rates.

“The fact is that (the office of civil rights) is once again going to have to do what local officials refuse to do,” Street said. “Nobody would listen to me when I claimed Christina was discriminating when it changed policy to accommodate one child and knew full well that the same policy had been used overzealously for others.”

Discipline rate of black students in Del., elsewhere is probed

Make that several schools.

But the star of HBO‘s Curb Your Enthusiasmwasn’t sitting at a desk. Instead, she was cleaning up run-down schools.

The project became School Pride, a seven-episode series that premieres tonight at 8 ET/PT on NBC. Think Extreme Makeover: Home Edition for schools.

But don’t expect to see much of Hines, who is School Pride‘s executive producer, in front of the camera. She will “pop up here and there to try and guide people who might be inspired by the show,” she says.

The gig is different. “When I go to work as an actress, I show up in an air-conditioned, nice place and somebody gets me coffee, and they do my hair and do my makeup until somebody tells me to go to the next air-conditioned room. On this project, I might have a toilet-bowl brush in my hand. I might be painting a classroom. At the end of the day, I just feel dirty and good.”

A feeling she might not have if it weren’t for daughter Catherine Rose, 6, who started first grade this year. “Before I had my daughter, I really didn’t think about schools at all,” Hines says.

“When she started school, it made me think about other parents and children, and made me feel like it does take a village. The idea of a child going to a school where the lights don’t work, where the toilets don’t flush, it makes me sad.

“I know that it’s not because parents don’t care. … Most of the time the resources aren’t there. What I’ve learned and what I’m still learning is how to connect all the resources to the right people.”

School Pride began with a “cold call” a few years ago to the principal of a school in Compton, Calif., where she volunteered. “I said, ‘I was wondering if your school needs any help,’ ” Hines says. “I thought I could donate some soccer balls and jump ropes. So she said, ‘Why don’t you come over and I’ll show you around.’ “

What she saw was “a bigger project than jump ropes and soccer balls. The school hadn’t been painted in 28 years.” The playground couldn’t be used because the sand was infested with bugs.

After renovations were completed, the series idea sprouted.

“I was just in a camera truck crying,” says Hines, who is calling from the site of her last school “reveal.” “I’ve cried a lot of tears of joy in the past five months.”

This summer included the end of her nearly eight-year marriage to Paul Young (father to Catherine Rose), so the project’s timing “has been helpful,” Hines says. “My ex-husband is truly a good friend of mine. I still talk to him every day. He was part of the inspiration for this show.”

Despite going through an amicable divorce, “it’s hard to go from being married to not being married,” Hines says. “Paul and I have so much respect for each other that it’s been difficult, but positive. We really do care about each other, and we’re going to be great parents to her.”

‘School Pride’ gives Cheryl Hines an education

These subtle moves can entice kids to make healthier choices in school lunch lines, studies show. Food and restaurant marketers have long used similar tricks. Now the government wants in on the act.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced what it called a major new initiative Tuesday, giving $2 million to food behavior scientists to find ways to use psychology to improve kids’ use of the federal school lunch program and fight childhood obesity.

A fresh approach is clearly needed, those behind the effort say.

About one-third of children and teens are obese or overweight. Bans on soda and junk food have backfired in some places. Some students have abandoned school meal programs that tried to force-feed healthy choices. When one school district put fruit on every lunch tray, most of it ended up in the garbage.

So instead of pursuing a carrot or a stick approach, schools want to entice kids to choose the carrot sticks, figuring children are more likely to eat something they select themselves.

“It’s not nutrition till it’s eaten,” said Joanne Guthrie, a USDA researcher who announced the new grants. The initiative will include creation of a child nutrition center at Cornell University, which has long led this type of research.

Some tricks already judged a success by Cornell researchers: Keep ice cream in freezers without glass display tops so the treats are out of sight. Move salad bars next to the checkout registers, where students linger to pay, giving them more time to ponder a salad. And start a quick line for make-your-own subs and wraps, as Corning East High School in upstate New York did.

“I eat that every day now,” instead of the chicken patty sandwiches that used to be a staple, said Shea Beecher, a 17-year-old senior.

“It’s like our own little Subway,” said Sterling Smith, a 15-year-old sophomore. (Hint to the school: Freshen up the fruit bowl; the choices are pretty narrow by the time Smith gets to his third-shift lunch period.)

Last year, the USDA asked the Institute of Medicine for advice on its school lunch and breakfast programs, which provide free or subsidized meals to more than 31 million schoolchildren each day. The institute recommended more fruit, vegetables and whole grains with limits on fat, salt and calories. But it was clear this wouldn’t help unless kids accepted healthier foods, Guthrie said.

“We can’t just say we’re going to change the menu and all of our problems will be solved,” she said.

The agency requested proposals from researchers on how to get kids to actually eat the good stuff. Cornell scientists Brian Wansink and David Just will get $1 million to establish the child nutrition center. Fourteen research sites around the country will share the other $1 million.

“Findings from this emerging field of research — behavioral economics — could lead to significant improvements in the diets of millions of children across America,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Cornell’s focus will be developing “smart lunchrooms” that guide kids to make good choices even when more tempting ones are around.

“We’re not taking things away from kids,” Wansink said. “It’s making the better choice the easier, more convenient choice.”

Wansink is a prominent food science researcher, known for studies on the depiction of food in paintings of the Last Supper and how the placement of a candy jar can affect how much people eat from it.

Christine Wallace, food service director for Corning City School District near Cornell University, met him a few years ago and invited him to use her 14 schools as a lab.

“We tend to look at what we’re offering and to make sure it’s well prepared and in the correct portion size, and not the psychology of it. We’re just not trained that way,” Wallace said.

For example, some Corning schools had express lines for a la carte items — mostly chips, cookies and ice cream. The idea was to reduce bottlenecks caused by full tray lunches that took longer to ring up. But the result was a public health nightmare.

“We were making it very convenient for them to quickly go through the line and get a bunch of less nutritious items,” Wallace said.

After studies by Wansink, they renamed some foods in the elementary schools — “X-ray vision carrots” and “lean, mean green beans” — and watched consumption rise. Cafeteria workers also got more involved, asking, “Would you rather have green beans or carrots today?” instead of waiting for a kid to request them.

And just asking, “Do you want a salad with that?” on pizza day at one high school raised salad consumption 30%, Wansink said.

You can lead kids to healthy food, but can psychology make them eat?