Junior’s request: permission to lunch
August 25, 2022
If you have ever happened to walk past Munger Science Center around 10:55 a.m. on a school day, you might have had to shuffle through crowds of seniors rushing to their cars to leave campus for lunch period. If you were not so lucky to join in on the trip off-campus, you might have observed or experienced the long lines to purchase food in any of the three cafeterias, where hungry sophomores and juniors wait impatiently to grab chicken tenders or prepared salads before food runs out. You might have also watched as students cut the line with their friends, hurrying to grab the Chinese chicken salad they hid earlier behind juices and cold drinks before anyone else could find it.
The daily lunch lines are so long, in fact, that lunch is significantly delayed for students whose classes run slightly late<sub></sub> and those who have to travel from Feldman-Horn or Munger. While sophomores still try to navigate through campus, juniors, already familiar with the Upper School find the cafeteria lines during lunch especially inconvenient because of their busy schedules and inability to leave campus.
To minimize the lunch lines, juniors should be able to leave campus for lunch like seniors. Both juniors and seniors are upperclassmen who are able to drive and have the responsibility to use off-campus privileges wisely. Shorts trips off campus would also provide brief changes of scenery to counteract some of the stress students face during their junior year and allow them to escape the high-pressure school environment. Shortened lunch lines would also benefit juniors and seniors who would prefer to stay on campus for convenience.
If seniors were prohibited from leaving campus until they were legally adults, then the keeping of juniors on campus would be justified — but because many seniors are still 17, just like many juniors, it makes sense to extend the privilege to both groups.
Allowing juniors to leave campus for lunch would effectively shorten cafeteria lines and enable students to buy food at their leisure, improving the lunch experience for all students at school.
