Kitchen Nightmares

When first witnessing the lunchroom situation on the first day of school, the scene was absolutely, positively, horrifying. The lunch line, turned lunch mob, consists of people slowly shifting their way forward in a triple or even quadruple file line, until they collect their lunch and leave through the crowded exit lines. One student that was interviewed stated that they delay getting lunch for upwards of ten minutes as a way to remain safe during the chaos of the lunch line—and this student is certainly not the only one that feels this way.

After interviewing around 15 students around the Senior Plaza and Commons, the general consensus is that most students don’t feel safe during lunch at SHS. How can you blame them? So far people have been seen crowding around tables with 8 to 10 chairs, chewing ferociously with bodily fluids flying everywhere, and worst of all: people kissing through their masks. Can you imagine? If there’s one thing COVID has improved, it is the PDA situation. But the situation speaks for itself: Lunch at SHS is not COVID safe!

The opportunity to eat lunch normally with everyone after almost 2 years is a very welcome change, especially when compared to last year’s isolating hybrid-lunch or Cohort D’s 24/7 at-home-lunch. However, the current state of coronavirus (the virulence, the infection rate, and how it will affect most people with the current vaccine) is generally still ambiguous. Some experts are still hesitant about occasionally going out to eat. Take Saskia Popescu, infectious-disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University as an example:

“Being indoors is a high-risk activity when you’re dining because you’re eating and you’re drinking. You have no mask on. There’s a bunch of other people whose vaccine status you don’t really know and who are also unmasked. You’re there for prolonged periods of time.”

Each and every student at SHS is going to need a whole lot of luck because they are dining in an exceptionally crammed dining hall 5 days a week. Ironically, the school administration has amped up its efforts of virus tracing without tackling the heart of the problem. It’s like buying 46 security cameras for a home and placing them all around the house, except for the wide-open front door. At SHS, COVID-tracing measures or “security cameras” are taken very seriously across all classrooms, yet the lunchroom has no such safety measures in place. It’s no surprise that students have been receiving an influx of “close contact” messages with some students having received upwards of 8 close contact messages in the span of two months of school.

To credit the administration, they’ve clearly put thought into the lunch system, as it is in both students’ and admin’s best interest to keep lunch as safe as possible, while still keeping our flexible seating arrangement. Reverting back to the safer lunches that we had last year is on the table, but after such a restraining year, most students wouldn’t eagerly agree to returning to that setting. The majority of students would prefer this mess of a lunch to the isolating lunch of the past. The true alternative would be to create more lunch periods such as a fourth or fifth lunch period, as to compensate for the increasing student body. This idea may have been effective if implemented at the beginning of the year, but incorporating a change like this now would be nearly impossible due to the intricacies of our schedules and classes.

Ultimately, it seems like there are not many ways in which the school can completely overhaul lunches to make them simultaneously safe and appealing. However, there is still an opportunity to make the existing lunch safer. The administration has already declared that the gym can be used by students during lunch if seating in the commons becomes too crowded. Additionally, the lunch line can be streamlined further. For starters, this means NOT packing together like a bunch of sardines. Creating a staggered entrance by adding more dividers to force people to form legitimate lines will effectively spread out the crowd. It is imperative that these measures are taken in order to make the lunch lines safer and more orderly. Moreover, the school must continue to search for methods to keep lunch safe and be open to minor changes (like the proposed lunch line change) to keep students safe. Every safety improvement made to current lunches will protect the health of our peers, faculty, and families.

Works Cited

Heil, Emily, and Tim Carman. “What You Should Know About Indoor Dining Amid the Delta Variant.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 5 Aug. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/08/05/restaurants-indoor-dining-delta-variant/.