Many students were surprised this fall when they discovered that our lunch had been split in two. After months of split lunches, we wanted to hear the voices of our school and get their thoughts on the matter.
To start out, the lunch ladies had some insightful thoughts about the divide. “It’s a lot of work. […] When we were doing […] just the one lunch, we [didn’t] serve [that many students], and this time we’re doing the split lunch, [and so the number of students] doubled.” She explained the main reasons for this were that the line is far shorter now, and that leaving and returning school grounds with a car is far harder with the parking and construction situation. Many people have wondered if we’d see a return of the combined lunch., “it turned out really good… My ladies did a really good job that day”. Another one chimed in, saying that “it was okay. It was very crowded that day, there were a lot of kids in line.” They also explained that they “think it’s gonna be permanent… We’re the only school [had been] one lunch, Provo High, Centennial, and all the middle schools, [they all use split lunch]. We love it anyway.” We’re glad it’s been good for the lunch ladies, but how has it affected clubs?
Dr. Gabbitas runs a few clubs, including robotics and the eSports club. The eSports club, along with many other clubs, used to be run during lunch. In a past article on construction, we’ve heard some of his thoughts on how clubs have been affected by the split lunches, but let’s go more in depth. Before split lunches, lunch was a great time for clubs. “The old lunch was a good time for meeting. Kids have so many things outside of school like jobs, sports and other extracurricular activities, and so lunch was an easy time for kids to gather for clubs.” With the split lunch however, Dr. G says that “it’s hard to get everyone together… Half the people have one lunch, and so you can’t really get together and get organized.” Since we’re probably not going to go back to the combined lunch schedule, we asked him if he could think of any workarounds, and after thinking out loud for a bit, his final conclusion was that there really isn’t a way to get around it.
At the start of the year, there was a petition headed by Elizabeth Oldroyd to end split lunch that garnered 395 signatures at the time of writing. The top comment by Mason Jones says, “The fact that the first lunch is at 10 am and they want to further split up friends after a whole year of isolation, they clearly haven’t thought this through. If there’s one thing that everyone hated about middle school it was split lunches because it takes away the only time they give us to speak with our friends because it splits up everyone. This won’t solve the parking issue either because people who leave for lunch still have to come back so the same spaces will be needed. This will also encourage kids to skip classes to eat with their friends. All around this is simply an awful idea and it must be changed.” When interviewing Elizabeth Oldroyd about how she felt split lunch had gone so far, she had to say, “It’s a little bit better than I had expected, just because of the way it’s split by class.” She said she still thinks split lunch is a bad idea though, and that there are better alternatives.
All in all, split lunches haven’t been the worst thing in the world, but it hasn’t been totally good either.
