Reply to “Closed campus” at lunch but no enforcement?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Teacher here. I’m stunned that so many parents think an open lunch is the answer.

High school students are (mostly for those who are not repeaters) still minors. MCPS had a responsibility to keep these kids safe. If they leave for lunch and get hit by a car, robbed, or get themselves into any other unthinkable situation, we CANNOT keep them safe.

The only real solutions are…
1) structuring the school day so campuses with 2000+ kids have A, B or C lunch
2) teaching your kids to respect adults and the importance of fiscal and health responsibility.

I want to know how parents are ok with funding $10+ lunches every day and accepting the health concerns that come with eating fast food for every meal. Parents need to teach their kids how to prepare food ahead of time — this is an important life skill.

Also. Parents need to hold the standard at home when it comes to listening to (gasp) authority. Americans are so afraid of holding people accountable. Literally had a 9th grader look me in the eyes and blow me off when I asked her why she was leaving school (in the middle of 2nd period). Rolled her eyes and walked right out the main doors.

Parents should be ashamed of the individuals they are raising.[/quote]

This 100% .  They used to have multiple periods for lunch.  One lunch makes no sense when all the kids cannot fit in the cafeteria.  As a parent if my kid was rude to a teacher, I'd want to know and they would be apologizing to that teacher and consequences at home.[/quote]

I too went to an MCPS high school where we had the A,B, C lunch in the ‘90s and while it worked, there were tradeoffs.

1. The logistics in the schedule were a headache. Configuring classes with that many lunch options was confusing from a student perspective. I can only imagine what that was like on the counselor’s end.

2. The constant bells ringing was annoying and distracting. And we didn’t always know which bell was dismissing class or indicating a lunch dismissal. And with half-days? Forget it. Even more confusing.

3. Having multiple lunches meant kids ate really early and were hungry by the end of the day or ate really late and were hungry throughout the day. We dealt with this by grabbing snacks from the vending machines, but schools are now locking the vending machines during the school day.

4. Kids would use bathroom breaks or skip to visit friends in other lunches. This is mild and quaint compared to the chaos  we see today with teens leaving campus during lunch and terrorizing the community. But we do have to acknowledge that having multiple lunch periods adds more monitoring responsibilities to staff to ensure the right kids are in the right lunch period.

I point all of this out just to show that there really is no perfect solution. Just tradeoffs we’re willing to live with. Multiple lunch periods allow us to keep kids in the building and more specifically in the cafeteria. But it complicates scheduling and requires more monitoring to ensure kids are in their lunch period and not visiting a friend’s.

One lunch period simplifies scheduling, but forces kids to spread throughout the building. It also allows kids to meet with each other as clubs or teachers, since everyone has lunch at the same time. This model does also require oversight and monitoring, particularly for those schools who are supposedly “closed campuses,” which MCPS completely drops the ball on as this thread has highlighted.[/quote]

You can pack your kids snacks.  Simple solution.[/quote]

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