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The USDA just announced new nutrition standards targeting milk, whole grains and sodium requirements for school meals. The new standards go into effect for the next school year, and will run at least through the 2023-2024 school year. By issuing transitional standards, the USDA is giving schools time to transition from current, pandemic operations, toward more nutritious meals, they said. Research shows that many children receive their healthiest meals of the day at school. The USDA previously updated the school nutrition standards in 2012. The new standards establish the following: h Milk: Schools may offer flavored low-fat, or 1%, milk in addition to nonfat flavored milk and nonfat or low-fat unflavored milk. h Whole Grains: At least 80% of the grains served in school lunch and breakfast each
week must be whole grainrich. h Sodium: Starting in the 2023-2024 school year, lunches must have a 10% lower sodium rate weekly than they do currently.
Stepped on one too many loose LEGO bricks? You can ditch them, without any guilt. LEGO Replay allows you to donate bricks to kids in need, and it’s as easy as tossing them in a box. Just go to lego.com/replay, print out a shipping label, box up your bricks and bring them to your closest FedEx location. The bricks you send will be sorted and cleaned before being donated to Teach for America or Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston. The SAT is going digital, shifting to online exams in 2024. The new SAT will be similar to the current test; it will still be scored on a 1600 scale, feature multiple choice sections, and students will still have to take it in proctored settings, such as a school or testing center. But the digital version will be shorter, running only about two hours, because it relies on adaptive testing. That means the test changes based on the students' answers, with the goal of reducing the time students spend answering questions that are either too easy or too hard. The reading sections will be shorter and more closely related to material students would likely read in college, according to the College Board. Students will also be able to use calculators during the entire math section, an expansion from previous versions of the test. Another plus? When the test goes digital, students will get their test scores back in days as opposed to weeks. 6 | MARCH 2022 | BayStateParent
AMAZON.COM
A new study warns of the danger of high-powered magnets commonly found in kids’ toys and desk sets. The study, which involved 24 children’s hospitals across the country, looked at 600 cases of high-powered magnet-related injuries from 2017-2020. Researchers found that 56% of children treated for these injuries required hospitalization and nearly one in ten had a potentially life-threatening injury. These small, shiny magnets are so strong that if more than one is swallowed, they can attract to each other across tissue, cutting off blood supply to the bowel. The magnets were originally recalled by the the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 2012 due to rising numbers of ingestions, but were permitted to return to the market in 2016 as long as they weren’t marketed toward children. But the study highlights the access young children still have to these products. While the magnets can only be marketed to those 14 years or older under U.S. law, 95% of the children evaluated were under the age of 14. The average patient age in the study was 7, which researchers noted was older than that of most other foreign body ingestions. “Because damage caused by magnets can be serious, it’s so important to keep these kinds of magnets out of reach of children, and ideally out of the home,” the study’s author said.
