The current policy about how this school handles lunch is frankly disgusting.
When the bell rings to end period four, every single student does one of three things: they eat their lunch in the cafeteria, they eat their lunch in a classroom, or they eat their lunch on the floor somewhere in the school. The big issue is that the majority of students choose to gather with friends and sit on the floor to eat their lunch; the same floor that the entire student and staff body walk on every day.
These students say that the feeling of freedom this gives them is a good change of pace from the hard routine of going from one class to another for an entire day. They say that being in high school means they need options like this presented to them so they can make their own decisions to prepare them for college and even adulthood. In high school, the only choices the student makes regarding their schedule is what they want in it. They have little control over when and where it happens, so having at least some opportunity to choose during the day is healthy.
Students and staff alike will also say that this simplifies the schedule. If the school were to change the schedule to the way Robert Frost Middle School handles lunch – by separating lunch into different blocks based on grade – there would be a part during the day that is challenging to map to a time card. Frost’s system involves a bell that students currently in class ignore because it signifies the end of lunch for another grade and not the start of the next class. If our school were to implement this schedule, there would be several bells that get ignored by a large portion of the student body, which can be confusing especially to freshmen.
In short, much of the student body eats on the floor because it feels freeing to be able to choose and it is simply more convenient to eat somewhere close to your next class instead of going all the way down to the cafeteria, which is far away from most of the school. The reason students would choose to not eat directly inside a classroom is because of how social of a time lunch is. Students are allowed to chatter and discuss just about anything knowing that they are causing little disturbance to teachers inside classrooms. With the exception of club meetings, classrooms tend to be an unpopulated zone during lunch because students do not want to disturb the teacher inside too greatly. Therefore, eating in the hallways is the perfect solution.
However, this should not be the case because of the hygiene issues about eating on the floor. Students collectively take hundreds of steps on any given part of the hallway where they bring in any dirt or bacteria that was on them and leave it on the floor. When students then eat food from the same place, there is a good chance of them picking up the bacteria or dirt and getting sick. One such disease is leptospirosis which can infect humans simply from contact with soil that houses the bacteria that would have been brought inside from students’ shoes, according to the CDC. Knowing this, the school should try to alter the schedule to imitate that of Frost by separating lunch into several blocks by grade and having everyone eat in the cafeteria. There will be schedule complexities and perhaps confusion among students, but if Frost can do it successfully, this school should be more than capable of doing the same. Granted, the immense freedom that was given to students being able to decide exactly where to eat is hard to recreate, but simply being allowed 42 minutes to socialize combined with advisory typically being used in a similar way, students should feel free enough while in school.
