Longer lunches can benefit students and teachers
The lunches at Northern high school are 35 minutes long, and there is not enough time for students to safely go off campus and get their lunch. Outside of Northern, there is a busy street so traffic is an issue for the students who choose to leave campus for lunch. There are a variety of students who drive to school, but only juniors and seniors are allowed to go off campus, if they buy a lunch pass. Northern has many issues with administration’s policies regarding lunches like time management, safety and, equity.
leaving your second or third period and then walking to your car can take up to 10 minutes. And the wait for people to leave the student parking lot, that could take up to 10 minutes. Depending on where you decide to go for lunch, it can take up to 15 minutes not including waiting in traffic to get to your destination. If there were to be five minutes taken off each class, lunch could be a total of 60 minutes long. This would finally make enough time for students to safely leave school, get to their destination, obtain their food, and come back with spare time to eat.
Northern students are not the only people to go out for lunch. Locals like workers and other high school students go out during their lunch as well, which collide with Northern lunches as well. Mass amounts of additional lunch time travelers on the road only adds to time and safety constraints.
When a student is late for class when returning from lunch and they do not have a pass, their tardy is considered unexcused. This runs into the issue of three tardies... three tardies are equal to an unexcused absence, which could alter with the actual absences of the student and cause them to have to take a exam that is not required for the class.
A lunch pass at Northern is 20 dollars. Northern is one of the only schools in Durham where you need to pay for an off campus pass to go off campus. When students come back from going off campus, they are not always done with their lunch. Some teachers allow students to eat their lunch in class, but others make their students eat outside of class. In other occurrences, some teachers do not allow either, which could lead to arguments, write ups and a delay in class time. If lunches were longer, none of these points would not be a problem. Students would be able to go off campus, come back, and eat their food - possibly even have spare time to do work or relax.
Overall, students should have more time for lunch. A longer lunch period helps students and teachers so they get to refresh themselves and relieve stress and get ready for the next class or two. Longer lunches would not only benefit our students, but our entire community of Northern Durham with the increase of time and safety.