High School Should Increase Lunch Time, Trim DSB

For years now, we seniors at  have had a pretty sweet deal with the school; we can go out to eat during lunch and leave for a 45 minute block every Friday. Add that together with internships and online classes and a lucky senior could be out of school for more than three hours of the day.

But that kind of perfect storm is rare. The only one of these privileges that any senior can take advantage of every day is going out for lunch. However, this cherished benefit comes with a downside – we aren’t given enough time to properly use it.

Lunch blocks at the school are about 25 minutes long. That’s 25 minutes for students to leave their classrooms, walk out to the parking lot, drive to a restaurant that’s probably crowded with other students, order their food, wait for it, and drive back. After all that, there’s not always much time left for the actual eating.

It doesn’t take a great imagination to think about all the issues that result from this; students getting to class late, students eating in class, students driving recklessly to get back in time, students eating while driving. A friend of mine got into an accident during lunch on the very first day of this school year, proving that a parking lot full of teenage drivers is dangerous enough without adding a time limit.

One might think that the best solution is to simply take away the privilege. I would disagree. The problem isn’t the fact that we are allowed to go out for lunch, the problem is that we were given this tempting opportunity without enough time to make it work.

This situation could easily be remedied by a minor schedule tweak. Any senior would tell you that a measly five extra minutes would be enough to stop lunch from being a daily scramble for time. Because the school has three lunch blocks, this amounts to an extra 15 minutes out of a six and a half hour long day.

So where should the time come from? The rest of the school day is made up of four 77 minute long classes and DSB, the 45 minute period I mentioned before which is essentially a break that can be used for doing work or relaxing. Out of the two, DSB is the obvious choice. It should be cut down to a half hour, with the extra time being divided among the three lunch blocks, thus fixing the problem without shortening any class times.

Doing this would take a lot of the stress away from what is supposed to be a break in the day.