<p>my school had it (i graduated in '06), but they may be getting rid of it soon</p>
<p>Officially kids aren’t allowed to leave our campus during the day. However there are something like 35 doors to the outside. Many kids do go out for lunch. However I doubt anyone drives to get lunch - there’s plenty of fast food right across the street. Lunch periods are staggered half periods, so there’s not much time.</p>
<p>As a parent, especially in view of the potential for serious problems, I don’t favor this open lunch concept the way it is set up at the school in my op (open to all grades, no sign in/out, no permission forms etc.). Since my kids are still high school age I still want to know where they are as much as possible, and if the campus is closed, that’s one less worry for me. I really don’t see any educational or social benefits to it that outweigh the potential for disaster. I see this open lunch thing as one more example of “too much, too soon”…ie too much freedom at too early of an age. Aren’t they supposed to be at school to learn, in the first place? If they eat at school then less time is wasted for travel time to/from lunch and more time is available for learning. When they go to college, hopefully they will be more mature and will handle the freedom better as a result.
After reading all the different scenarios above, and giving this lots of thought, this is just my opinion…so no flamers, please!</p>
<p>You might have really disliked my public HS scheme then (open campus for all - all day). It was one of the few public high schools in the country (it was in Colorado) at that time to utilize the ‘modular’ system. Instead of the usual 6 periods it had 24 mods (modules). For the core classes they had ‘large group’ and ‘small group’ classes where large group was in one of the well equipped lecture halls with perhaps any one of the teachers in the department lecturing. The small groups were very small - maybe 12-15, sitting around a conference table to discuss what was presented in the large group. Large group might have met 2 days a week and small 3 days a week or vice versa or a variant. During times when one wasn’t in a class (may 2 or 4 twenty minute mods) one would go to one of the resource centers which were specific to math/science, English, social sciences, etc. for studying or consulting with teachers not currently in class. They could also go to the library all day long and the cafeteria all day long (although food was served for only a couple of hours). I routinely went off campus for lunch. It was setup much like college. </p>
<p>Anyway, it resulted in some people starting school maybe at 8am and others at 11:20am and some being done for the day at 3:30pm while others might have been done at noon on some days (every day was a different schedule) and people taking lunch at different times. Because of this it was an open campus because students would come and go at different times.</p>
<p>That type of system required a fair amount of self-discipline for the student and some could handle it and some couldn’t. I know some parents complained about the system and others liked it. I thought it was great and wish my kids could have experienced a system like that. I think theschool ceased doing it a few years after I graduated.</p>
<p>wonder why they changed the policy? does sound a bit complicated administratively…and it would be great for some students, but maybe not the majority…</p>
<p>I think they changed it because it because with the increased independence and responsibility placed on the student, some did well with it and some didn’t. I suspect that a number of parents must have complained - especially if their kids had a difficult time with it. I wonder if there are any public high schools practicing this type of schedule now.</p>
<p>My school had open campus, with wednesdays being an hour lunch. When they found out we were driving for food on wednesdays though, we were told walking only. We were w/i walking distance of every eatery imaginable (downtown dallas), so it worked out.</p>
<p>In our district, open lunch goes along with a schedule in which the entire school has a 40-minute lunch period, all at the same time. </p>
<p>The positive side of this schedule is that it enables teachers to meet with students for extra help during lunch, because everybody is free at the same time, and it also provides an opportunity for some clubs to meet – thereby making some degree of extracurricular participation possible for kids who are dependent on the school buses as their only source of transportation or who have to take care of younger siblings or hold jobs after school gets out and therefore cannot participate in traditional after-school extracurriculars.</p>
<p>The negative side of this schedule is that the cafeterias couldn’t possibly feed (or even provide enough seats for) two thousand kids simultaneously. Open lunch, which encourages some kids to leave campus on days when they don’t have anything special (like a club meeting) going on at lunchtime, eases the strain on the cafeteria facilities. And the kids love it.</p>
<p>Several years ago, our high schools had to go to closed campuses temporarily because of a safety threat in the area (the so-called Beltway Sniper). Because of extreme crowding problems, the schools had to stagger lunch periods – with half the kids eating while the other half were in class – thereby eliminating any hope of holding extracurricular activities or teacher-student conferences during lunch. And the cafeterias were still overcrowded. Everyone was delighted when the situation ended only a few days later.</p>
<p>At S’s public suburban HS students are not even allowed to return to their cars in the parking lot without permission. NO ONE leaves campus during the day. I prefer it that way, especially now that my son drives himself to school!</p>
<p>Reading this post through, I’m realizing that our S’s h.s. has addressed some of the issues at the core of the problem. Architecturally and programmatically, they have rethought lunchtime. It is so appealing that students don’t want to leave (they can’t, but…) even though it’s a privileged suburban demographic with a parking lot full of cars.
The school was built as an “Open Concept” school in the l960;s. I’d seen this for elementary schools, but not for high schools, when we moved here.
There are no hallways, no inner walls in the school to form traditional classrooms. It may have started as a kind of hippie idea, but today they use the architecture of “Open-Plan High School” to teach the kids to live up to the trust and respoonsibility it implies we place in them. Watching now for 3 years, I think the school’s administrators are extremely successful communicating this to the students, and the architecture is the backdrop that makes it possible.
The cafeteria isn’t a cafeteria at all. It was built like a food court, and is the first thing you see upon entering the school’s front door. It’s open to all four main hallways on the first floor, and it has no walls around it. The tables are recessed down into a conversation pit-style lower floor.
All the tables are round, more conducive to conversation than those long rectangles. There are several choices for buying food from different sources, like a suburban “food court” in a modern mall.
Students may go to it any time of the day they wish. They sell breakfast, healthy snack and lunch foods all day. The usual table-groups that stratify highschools by race, class, or interest (jock, nerd…) do not exist because there’s no telling when you might be at the “lunch cafe.” Tremendous mobility and a changing scene every day.
You’d think this place would be noisy, but it’s not. Adults and kids talk quietly because they need to consider everyone else.
What fascinates me is that, 2 miles away and in the same school district, is another high school for a different cachement area of the suburb. Their cafeteria, classrom and hallways were built traditionally in roughly the same year. SAME demographic, and yet they do have lunchroom problems and unpleasantries.
If anyone reading this is on a school board or even parent committee, it’s worth finding out if your school can rip out the innards of the “school cafeteria”, turn it into a cafe-food court, put in round tables, and serve all day. Perhaps if it were more appealing, kids wouldn’t want to rush away from it.</p>
<p>I happen to work in our high school’s cafeteria. We have round tables, but traditional serving lines and 4 traditional lunch periods. We haven’t had ANY trouble in the cafe in years. There are administrators and teachers on duty at every lunch, but they don’t stand over the kids in a threatening way, they’re just there. Maybe it’s because the poor kids only get 20 minutes to get their food and eat, they’re too busy choking down their sandwiches and chicken nuggets to have time to get into trouble!</p>
<p>FYI, we hope to have our hs remodelled in a few years, at that point we hope to switch to a food-court type of serving area. But the “serving all day” thing… I handle the cafeteria’s office work, such as payroll, and I think that would be a very expensive way to run a cafeteria. Our cafe must be self-supporting – the school district expects us to cover all our own expenses, including payroll. I don’t think we could afford to cook and staff the cafe all day unless we drastically raised lunch prices.</p>
<p>With the advent of increased focus on ‘healthy lunches’ in the school cafeterias, including the ban on soda sales on campus in California, I wonder if students will be more inclined to go off campus now so they can bulk-up on the unhealthy fast food and soda that they prefer.</p>
<p>however- we have a recent interesting case, at a local private school where students * Do* eat in the cafeteria.
Good food, good price.
However, and I am not necessarily suggesting the preparation was at fault, but they had to close the school, because so many students and staff were ill with the flu.
It only is logical, that there must be some common denominator, Whether the culprit is the ventilation system, the break time shared bottle of vino in the chapel ( ok I am making a joke), Typhoid Mary dishing out Swedish meatballs, or nobody ever washes their hands- there has to be someway it is getting passed around to this extent.</p>
<p>So maybe going off campus for lunch isn’t so bad after all?</p>
<p>I can only speak for my kids but while they might consider pizza a basic food group, they have been taught at home and at school so much about what is good that their taste buds are kind of trained to actually like food that is good for them. I’ve run quite a few snack bars for musical and instrumental performances where the kids chose bottled water and the parents were the ones choosing soda. The banning of snack foods is becoming a nationwide trend. They were banned from our school district this year. I don’t make a big deal of serving healthy foods but that’s what my kids are used to and I think that’s fairly common. oh, and we only have one fast food place in our town so it’s not really a lunchtime option even if they could sneak off campus.</p>