In previous years, lunch was divided, where 9th and 10th grade had their own lunch time, and 11th and 12th grade had their own lunch time. Lunch was still pretty chaotic and messy with so many students in the lunchroom, but it was still manageable. But in the 23-24 school year, it’s changed, for the worse.
Firstly, the general consensus among students is that the new lunch policy is worse. In her interview, junior Jada Broadway noted, “unless you’re one of the first in line, it takes forever to get food, and by the time you do get food, it’s cold and not good — not that it was good to begin with.” From my experience in the lunchroom, it’s overwhelming to be there, and very few SA students sit there. Most leave campus, when they can, or sit in random teacher’s rooms. Most students in senior academy try to eat lunch off campus, to avoid the chaos of the lunch room. But, eating off-campus is expensive, especially for teenagers, not to mention the many people that rely on school lunch. Senior Tiggy Agok had this to say, “the lunch line is just so long, and there’s so much cutting.” The point of school lunch is to provide food for people who either can’t afford to pay the rising food costs or simply don’t want to. Because of this change, it prevents people from using lunch time as a break, and it prevents them from getting the food they need.
On a different note, compared to last year, the mess doesn’t appear worse, but it is more distributed across the school: lunchroom, classrooms, seating areas next to the cafeteria, etc. Since the dust force is already overworked, undervalued, and underpaid, this policy only serves to greaten their workload. With the larger number of students, there is less control and structure in the lunchroom. In the beginning of the year, lunch staff — teachers on lunch duty, lunch ladies, and so on — did maintain some structure and order in the lunchroom, but things quickly fell apart.
On the other hand, the Deans seem to disagree almost entirely with student’s perspectives. For instance, Mr. Johnson, who is the Prep Academy Dean, expressed that, “Things seem to be running pretty smoothly, not too chaotic or messy.” When asked the reason for the new system, Senior Academy dean Mr. Johnson stated, “since we are on a semester system now, we had to find a period where all students could eat lunch so that we could maintain students’ learning minutes.” While this is a valid point, shifting periods and keeping the same amount of time for lunch wouldn’t decrease or increase a student's learning time, it would just change when those learning minutes were happening. This supposed balance of learning minutes doesn’t really compensate for the lack of structure, and overall, worse quality of lunch for all students. One possible explanation, Mr Jones said, is that “Dean workload has increased significantly with DI and RP.” Splitting lunches would likely increase that workload further if interventions in the Prep Academy and the Senior Academy were held at different times. Mr. Jones adds, “There are much more kids in intervention than last year, because Live School catches more students misbehavior.” But still, the students who don’t misbehave and don’t receive logs are being punished by shared lunch, in favor of students who break the rules. Dean Intervention and Responsibility Prep could be after school, or before school, or on Fridays, which would help to better persuade students to avoid “loggable” behaviors.
In the beginning of the year, one attempted solution was to stagger when PA and SA were released from classes. Originally this worked, but it changed because, as Mr. Jones put it, “It was too difficult to ensure teachers were releasing students on time, and some underclassmen were sneaking out of the school.” So how should the school fix this? I believe that re-separating lunches would be too messy to schedule, but staggering release times could work, since underclassmen sneaking out is a separate issue. Without a doubt, the policy needs reform for the sake of students, the dust force, and the lunch staff.
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