Students Respond to Heightened Lunch Restrictions

Jayant Bettadpur, Reporter| September 29, 2022

  • In the atrium, students sit down on the floor and various chairs to eat lunch. While tables and couches allow students limited seating options, many students choose to sit on the floor to eat with their friends.

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  • Students gather around tables in the cafeteria to have lunch and socialize. With both round and rectangular tables, the cafeteria allows students a variety of seating arrangements to choose from.

    Lena Boas
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  • Students sit around the library patio during lunch. While students are not able to have food in the library, they can eat on the patio and tiled area at the front of the library.

    Lena Boas
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Due to changes made by the administration in August, students must now deal with new limitations on where to eat during lunch. Last school year, students were allowed to eat lunch in hallways and stairwells throughout the school. However, students are now restricted to only eating in the cafeteria, library patio, atrium, or outside. To ensure students stay in these areas during lunchtime, the hallways in the rest of the school have been blocked off.

“[For lunch], I usually just go outside, because it’s like more spread out there,” Mason Jacob ‘25 said. “[My friends and I] can’t really find any places inside the building anymore.”

The new restrictions have created an inability for friend groups to find space inside the building to eat, forcing them to resort to sitting on the floor and other inconvenient spaces.

“Last year it was a lot easier to eat with my friends because there was a lot more space,” Aamir Kutianawala ‘24 said. “But now I struggle to find space and I can’t really eat with my friends that much, because even when I do find space, it’s on the floor in places we don’t want to sit.”

Students are also now unable to get to class early to avoid hallway traffic, resulting in an increase in crowds at the end of lunch, usually in the hallways directly opposite the cafeteria

“[Going to class now], the hallways are really congested, and it’s really hard to get around,” Zane Hyman ‘25 said.

The cafeteria has become where most students now eat, including freshmen, who haven’t had the opportunity to experience eating in the hallways. The big tables in the cafeteria give friends the space to eat together while avoiding the atrium floors.

“I think I would prefer to eat in the cafeteria more than the hallways [even] if they were available,” Ian Carpenter ‘26 said. “I don’t think the hallways would be a very nice and clean space to sit.”

The new lunch restrictions have limited the ability of students to find space to eat together, and have increased the crowding of hallways after lunch, upsetting some students while leaving others indifferent.