it's possible with minecart and stockpile logic to set up an infinitely refilling stockpile of food for solitary confinement cells, with zero micromanagement after setup.
First, to make sure your cells don't get your entire fortress' food supply and starve out the fort, set the stockpile that the minecart's home stop takes from to give to every main food store in the fort, so that it will only receive food if every store is full. Then make a route with a (non-dumping!) stop near each of your cells, set to guide the minecart away after (100/num_cells)% has been removed from its load. Link each stop to a minecart-dump QSP that drops things through the roof of the cell. Congrats, your dwarves will now constantly haul food to your
inmates beloved kiddies.
This should remove at least some of the worries of child mortality rates from the organisers of Camp Childcare.
kitchens->food stores->general population
| ^
| |
stockpile ______|
|
QSP -> cell
|
QSP -> cell
|
QSP -> cell
|
...
|
QSP -> cell
|__________ and then minecart comes back empty
Off-topic-but-maybe-slightly-on-topic question: Does a repeater based on two tiles of water, one 7/7 and one 6/7, with a pressure plate set to 7/7 only on the one tile, work? Or is the speed too fast for the single pressure pad to handle? A repeater like the could be useful for training.
Also, maybe a long, 2+ wide corridor with a set of raising bridges in the centre so as to throw the children into the open floor space? Not sure if it would train anything but it would certainly toughen them up with injuries, and I doubt they would be severely injured if you built the walls and bridges out of wood or candy (because why not). Plus, it's free xp for your medical crew. That would of course only be helpful in a boarding school setup.
Edit: grammar.