All across the world, as the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, employees, employers and students alike take a lunch break. They use the time eat, relax and rest before returning to work with a renewed mindset. However, as the students at Oyster River High School (ORHS) say, lunchtime at ORHS is quite the opposite of relaxing.
The culprit? The dreaded lunch line.
The lunch line is a hot topic this year, and students have many complaints about the switch from three lunches to two lunches–a switch that means the school is returning to its previous ways after the impact COVID had on the school.
While it may be an annoyance for students, the switch to two lunches has alleviated much of the stress for teachers that comes with having to plan around having lunch in the middle of class. It has also made the job easier for the cafeteria employees who now have extra time between lunches.
The line is undeniably longer this year than it was last year and students have taken notice. Henry Miller (’25), who has had lunch at the school for all four years of his high school career, says that the visual difference is quite striking. “When you’re walking out of the cafeteria and seeing [the line stretch] past the nurse’s office, it’s kind of wild,” he says.
Sophie Elsmore (’26), a student who gets lunch at school every day, says that the time it takes to wait in the line causes her to lose time that she could be talking with her friends or eating. “I waste a lot of my lunch time just waiting to even get into the cafeteria.”
In the schedule of an ORHS student, there is a 35-minute lunch break sometime during the third block which takes place from 11:05 to 1:00 every day. This year, students are somewhat evenly divided into two lunches depending on what subject they have during their third block.
The first lunch takes place before the students’ 80-minute third period class, and the second lunch begins after the full 80-minute third period class.
Last year, there was another lunch sandwiched between the two. This lunch would divide classes in half, meaning students would go to class for 40 minutes at the beginning of the period, then break for lunch before returning for the remaining 40 minutes of the class. That lunch had significantly fewer people, while the first and third lunches were overflowing. Now the question arises from the student body: why not switch back to three lunches and fully utilize the middle lunch?
While this may seem like a feasible solution, only having two lunches this year has fixed many problems that have been present for the last five school years since COVID.
Principal Rebecca Noe says that after looking at the capacity of the lunchroom, she “looked at the ways we could go back to having two lunches based on the numbers [of students at ORHS] and how small the lunches were for the last two years.”
While the idea of having two lunches may seem new to ORHS students of today, before COVID, the lunch schedule consisted of only two lunches. At that time, the student body was larger than it is now, and with the need to stay 6 feet apart during lunchtime, came the need for a larger number of lunches. Even with space to eat in the multi-purpose room and tables lined up down the hallways, they needed a whopping four lunches to accommodate everyone.
As COVID restrictions became less strict and the school began to return to some sense of normality, the student population had also coincidentally decreased, and the four lunches were no longer necessary. That’s what led to the three-lunch schedule being put into effect two years ago.
The decision to subtract another lunch period this year was made by the leadership team consisting of the Principal, the Director of Counseling, the Assistant Director of Special Education, the Athletic Director and both Assistant Principals. Together, the group helps to make important decisions impacting the school.
The main factor that contributed to their decision to eliminate the third lunch was feedback from teachers. English teacher Shauna Horsley had what was called ‘second lunch’ last year: the lunch that would split classes into 40-minute halves, with a break to eat in the middle. Last year, one of her Essentials of English classes took place during lunch block. She talks about how that class during the lunch period fell behind her other classes, and to keep from being unable to catch up, she would be forced to omit parts of the curriculum. She says, “We would come back from lunch, and we’d lose a lot of time settling down… It messed up the continuity of my class, especially if we were doing things like discussions.”
Horsley knows she wasn’t the only one dealing with this issue either. She says, “From talking to other people in my department, I think most of us thought it was difficult to have [the middle lunch].”
The reintroduction of the two lunches certainly benefits teachers, while also benefiting both the cafeteria employees and the custodians.
When there were three lunches last year, the time in between each lunch was only 5 minutes—a massive difference to the 50 minutes that they now have. This not only takes some of the stress off, but also helps them to create an improved lunch experience for students. As Tim Kenaley, the Cafeteria Manager, states, “It gives us [about] an hour in between to cook fresh stuff rather than have food sit around for an hour and a half before it actually gets served… [It also] gives the ladies an actual lunch break.”
Custodian Kirk Marshall speaks on how having a longer time between lunches benefits the custodians who do a brief sweep of the cafeteria between lunches to pick up as much trash as possible. He says that last year, students were sometimes sitting down at the tables before he even had the chance to pick up the trash from the previous lunch. While the custodians prefer for students to pick up their own trash and clean up their own messes, that’s not always the case, so they need that break between lunches to make sure the room is ready for when the next group comes in.
While the solution came easy to teachers and cafeteria staff, students still feel the need to improve on one major problem: the length of the line.
Haley Kavanagh (’25) has a specific suggestion, seeing a major issue in the wrap line. She says, “They wait in the first line, and then they have to wait in the second line… Then that holds up people that aren’t getting wraps.” She says that employing a third cash register and using the door on the left side of the registers for the wraps-only line would go a long way.
Kenaley, when asked about these solutions, stated that while Kavanagh’s ideas are great ideas in theory, “we have a lot of staffing issues sometimes, so we [couldn’t] always make that happen.” If there were more cafeteria employees, they would be able to have another person at the register and another two at each of the side doors to let people in, at least during the beginning of the lunch rush.
While this could be a solution to work towards, his suggestion for something that could be implemented now was to ban backpacks in the line, a simple solution which would reduce crowding. This would allow more students at a time in the line while also allowing more students through the doors to get their food at the same time, which would therefore reduce wait times.
While no past lunch schedule is perfect for everyone, more new and innovative solutions like these are what we need to improve the lunch experience and get back to crunching our food, instead of our time.
-Sadie Goldberg with contributions by Mitchell Keesee
artwork by Jahrie Houle
Mouth of the River 
Leave a Reply