“Started a little blog to get some traffic, Old folks tell you not to play in traffic” – Kanye West
Well 9 year old Martha Payne played in traffic and her blog was blocked by school administration but luckily she was able to have her site reinstated. Check out Martha’s story after the jump.
A 9-year-old U.K. food blogger’s right to post about her school’s meal program was reinstated this week after politicians briefly silenced the tween writer.
As reported by the BBC, the Argyll and Bute Council today overturned its hours-long ban that prevented Martha Payne from posting photos of her western Scotland school’s meals on her blog, NeverSeconds.
“There is no place for censorship in this Council and never will be whilst I am leader,” Councillor Roddy McCuish said in a statement today.
Payne’s seven-week-old blog, in which she offers positive and negative feedback regarding her unnamed school’s food, began as part of an educational writing project. With permission from teachers, the student photographed her school lunches, posted pictures online every day, and added a “Food-o-meter” rating for each, The Telegraph reported.
Her efforts garnered national attention. Scotland’s Daily Record recently published a photo of Payne and Chef Nick Nairn under the headline “Time to Fire the Dinner Ladies.” That apparently did not sit well with school officials.
“This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office,” Payne wrote yesterday. “I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.”
Councillor McCuish said that Payne, “an enterprising and imaginative pupil,” was not the intended target of criticism. He instead blamed the Daily Record’s “inaccurate and abusive” attack on the school’s catering and dining hall staff, “which considerably inflamed the situation.”
On her blog, Payne said, “I only write my blog not newspapers.”
In addition to posting commentary on her school lunches, Payne has also been collecting donations for Scottish charity Mary’s Meals. Her fundraising surpassed its target of 7,000 British pounds, topping 5,000 pounds in donations in less than two hours. As of this writing, Payne’s total reached almost $36,000 pounds from about 2,700 donations, according to her JustGiving charity profile.
A “School Meals Summit,” which will gather the Argyll and Bute Council’s catering staff, pupils, and officials, will take place later this summer, McCuish announced.
