One-lunch schedule takes adjustment

Lunch this year is a game of seconds. The one-lunch schedule with built-in tutorials/meeting time puts twice the students in the period compared with last year’s schedule.

Sophomore Lisa Unger has been late to class more often because of the traffic.

“One time I was five minutes late to class,” Unger said. “There was traffic because of a funeral, and we got stuck behind them. We finally found a way out to school.”

Art teacher Julee Reese said that all the students leaving is “extremely dangerous.”

“Having freshmen with no license is a scary thought,” Reese said. “There’s hardly any place to go eat because everywhere is filled with people.”

Sophomore D.J. Cheuvront also said restaurants were too crowded.

“I hate how every place is crowded every day,” Cheuvront said. “There’re just too many people and not enough places to eat.”

Senior Austin Edwards didn’t like sharing lunch with homeroom and tutorial time.

“I don’t like how homeroom is,”  Edwards said. “I think we should be able to vote on either having homeroom and tutorials (HAT) during lunch or in the morning.”

The one-lunch schedule also made the cafeteria a crowded place with longer lines at the snack bar while the seating area seemed cramped with only 203 chairs for a student population of 703 the first week.

The one-lunch schedule was the result of collaborations between a nine-member faculty committee and administration. The committee was trying to solve the problem of students not getting to mandatory tutorials before school. The new schedule puts the tutorial as a regular period of the day with skipping resulting in truancy.

“I think its good for students to have the opportunity to come in the classroom during the day,” family consumer sciences teacher Julie Jameson said. “It’s much better to have it during the day than having it in the mornings before class.”

“It’s helpful to have a longer lunch because students have time to go to other classes and get they’re work done,” sophomore Nikki Loewen said. “But it also has its faults with having tutorials cut into our lunch.”

Sophomore Madeline Hiebert said  longer combined lunch was “a nice change.”

“I enjoy having a longer lunch period,” Hiebert said. “It’s pretty great to be with the upperclassmen.”

Junior Lindsey Wimmer liked not having to rush every lunch.

“I like that I have an hour instead of 45 minutes,” Wimmer said. “Now I have time to take a nap, and there’s just so much more you can do in one hour.”

For food service, the lines are longer, but the work goes faster.

“The day goes by much faster,” cafeteria staff member Eva Castillo said. “I like that I can get everything done in one long period instead of two periods.”

After having all the homeroom classes the first few weeks, most students earned a longer lunch, but three-week progress reports put over 150 failing students in mandatory tutorials with a mandatory email response or face discipline.

Club members, too, felt the squeeze on lunch hours since most organizational meetings were held during HAT.

“If you fail, you can’t go to your meetings,” junior Skyler Franklin said. “You have to stay in your tutorials no matter what.”

After the first six weeks, the student body became accustomed to sharing one lunch with each other, club meetings and tutorials.

“The lunch was alright at first,” senior Elisa Sanchez said. “Now that I’ve got the hang of it, I like it a lot more.”