“You’ll all get your lunch soon enough.” This is the slogan shared by aides throughout Haldane Middle School, but the back of the lunch line disagrees. Every day during lunch, the line to get food nearly reaches the stairs. As a result, it takes roughly 15.3 minutes (the average of the results of three tests conducted by the authors) for a person in the lunch line to get their food. This causes students to scramble to finish their lunches and contributes to shoving in the lines. “There are a lot of people who push and shove just to get all the way to the front,” seventh grader Karla Narvaez said.
Students sometimes find that the long lunch line hurts their academic progress, either because they don’t have time to eat or because they are forced to finish their lunches after the bell rings, making them late to their next class. One solution last year, in which Middle School Principal Dr. MaryAnn Seelke allowed students to be late to their classes without being marked as late, didn’t fully solve the problem, instead creating a new one. Paloma Mansour, a sixth grader, agreed that the lunch line affects her academic success. “Sometimes I just don’t eat,” she said, “and I get this weird thing where when I don’t eat, I faint, so I get really woozy in class, and I can’t pay attention to anything.” Isla Hudson, an eighth grader, also finds this to be true. “I’ve gotten two tardies,” she stated when asked about its effect on her. “It’s annoying.”
The lunch line is, in general, a bigger problem for middle schoolers than high schoolers. Unlike some high schoolers, middle schoolers don’t have the ability to hop in line at any time during a 45-minute period. In fact, they get half that time. Another reason why high schoolers don’t have this problem is that juniors and seniors can go off campus to get their lunch, which causes the high school lunch line to be shorter than the lunch line in the middle school. It also gives some high schoolers whose parents are unable to make lunch for them another option, which middle schoolers don’t have.
Despite its profound impact on middle schoolers, the long lunch line is also a problem for those who handle scheduling at Haldane. “We wanted to have eighth graders have lunch with ninth graders,” noted Kristen Amato, the counselor for grades kindergarten through eighth. “That, sadly, didn’t work.” Amato explained that differing USDA standards for school lunch programs between eighth grade and ninth grade prevent them from having lunch together.
Seelke summarised some goals for improvements to come. “We want to possibly switch places where certain grades will have recess so that we can stagger the lunch line,” Seelke, who handles scheduling with Amato, stated. We can look forward to this for next year, as a new schedule for lunch and recess is already confirmed. “The seventh and eighth graders will keep the normal schedule,” explained Selke, “but the fifth and sixth graders will have recess at 10:50 and lunch at 11:14.”
Still, the lunch line is a problem this year and needs to be fixed. One solution to the problems posed by the lunch line could be restructuring the line and places where people are served food. This would mean having three lines that would have each person in the front get their food at three stations that would serve all courses. After this, another three people would do the same, and so on. A more obvious solution could be having separate lunch times for different grades in middle school. This may not, however, be a good idea as it could be hard to schedule and could negatively affect some middle school clubs who meet during lunch. In the end, solving the problem of the long lunch line will need time and effort from students and schedulers alike, but it can be fixed. Seventh grader Violet Upham-Smith, summarizing the dilemma, said “though I know it’s a bit of a cliche, this is gonna require some teamwork.”
