Administrators announce new rules regarding lunch periods
Students are adapting to the new lunchroom changes. The second floor is no longer accessible to students during lunch periods and access.
October 29, 2021
Administrators announced new protocols for students to follow during lunch at the end of the school day on Oct. 15, and students are no longer allowed to spend their lunch and access periods on the second floor as of Oct. 18. Instead, students are to be either in the auditorium hallway, the library, the Victory and Spirit house lockerbanks, or the commons.
The decision for this modification involved feedback on the need for proper supervision The need for proper supervision during third through seventh period and the amount of garbage being left around the school were taken into account when making this modification.
“So generally just feedback, thoughts, and concerns about the lack of consistent supervision and the lack of garbage being left around the building,” assistant principal Daniel DeBruckyer said. “We have two, maybe three custodians on a daily basis that are here to clean up during the lunches.”
Along with wanting to ensure that students have supervision, administrators wanted to make sure that the learning environment was not disrupted.
“Besides the supervision, it would come down to the feedback we got from the second floor academic hallways, forum rooms, and classrooms with the volume, and reducing the amount of just general traffic that we have in the building,” DeBruycker said.
In past years, students were required to either eat in the commons or be in the library. Starting last year, students had more options on where to sit during their free period due to safety protocols concerning COVID-19. From the start of the current academic year, students had access to multiple areas around the school, and seniors were allowed to go off-campus, which was taken into consideration while determining the new setup for lunch.
“We started with having just about the entire building open during lunch because, when students are eating lunches, they have their masks off, so we wanted to make sure that we provided the distance that is needed to be able to eat with their masks off,” Dean Matthew Walpole said. “We have been monitoring how many senior students utilize off campus lunch, which affects the numbers of the students each lunch period that are staying here in the building. We came to the decision that we would be okay and still provide enough space for students if we brought everybody down to the first floor.”
As of right now, future plans for lunch and access periods depend on the amount of COVID-19 cases in DuPage County and how students are able to adhere to staying on the first floor during lunch. Administration’s current goal is to return to how lunches were set up in the previous years, but until the number of COVID-19 cases stay down, the school will continue to have a different routine for access and lunch periods. Administrators plan to stick with the current set-up and will determine if they need to make any changes towards the end of the first semester of the current school year.
“We are gonna continue to take feedback from our students and teachers in the community and combine that with what the directives are from DuPage County Health in our district. We will take all that information in and we come up with a plan moving forward,” Walpole said.
Owen • Oct 29, 2021 at 11:01 pm
I disagree with concentrating the students together as flu/Covid season heats up. You are saying that you don’t trust the students to be on that floor and that they need babysitting. Add more garbage cans to that floor. Give them the responsibility to pick up after themselves And start treating them like adults that they are becoming.
Devil's Advocate • Oct 29, 2021 at 4:12 pm
While technically there may be enough space for students to maintain a six-foot (or three-foot, given the exemption given to schools) distance between each other, that isn’t what’s happening. Instead, students sit next to and across from each other with their masks off, sometimes with less than one foot of distance between two people’s mouths and noses. While still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are entering cold and flu season. With students this close to each other, there is bound to be an increase in respiratory disease transmission. Just because there is the potential for space between students doesn’t mean that students actually leave that space.