Lunch time is everybody’s favorite period. You get to spend time with your friends and, most importantly, you get to have lunch. Lunch is one of the three important meals of the day.
I, like many others, take advantage of the free lunch we get here at school. I get lunch from the hut almost every day, so I know how chaotic it is to simply get lunch. There hasn’t been a single day where I don’t see people push each other in order to cut to the front of line. “There’s been multiple times when I’ve been in line for a while and by the time I get to the front I don’t get the food I want because of the people that cut,” senior Alexander Moran said. So why is this allowed to happen?
First, people who cut the line make the wait longer for those who are behind them. My fourth period class is in the 600s, really close to the hut, so it doesn’t take me long to get in line after the bell rings. Even though I am one of the first people to get in line, it still takes more than 8 minutes for me to get my lunch. This is because people cut, and it is always the same people every time, and nobody is doing anything to hold them accountable.
Second, it gets very chaotic when people cut the line. Well, it’s not even a line because of how disorganized it is, it’s more of a mosh pit of people trying to get lunch. It gets super crowded, you can’t move, you get pushed around and there is no one that does anything to stop it. Once you finally get your lunch you still struggle to find a way out of the crowd. I could go on and on about how stressful it is to get lunch or about how it irritates me that people get away with cutting the line and so much more, but I think that there is an easy fix to this issue.
We need supervisors, campus security or someone with authority to supervise this lunch line. Someone who makes sure that there are single file lines, that controls people pushing each other, that holds those who cut the line accountable. “I believe that there should be people standing right next to the lines, paying close attention because sometimes students take the opportunity to sneak into the line,” senior Yesenia Salinas said.
This wasn’t always an issue, at the beginning of the school year, there were lines and it was controlled. This was because there was a supervisor there, Pablo, who would oversee the lines and make sure that no one would cut. “At some point he [Pablo] was over there, he was assigned to that area, but he left because there was a shortage of security so we had to move him to another area,” head of security Jose Salcedo said.
Another huge reason why I believe that action needs to be taken is because it is only a matter of time before someone gets tired of the same people cutting the line and violence breaks out. And I can say this because I’ve seen situations like these unfold while in line, where someone gets annoyed at the fact that they are being pushed and tries to start an argument with the other person. This is dangerous because if a fight does break out in this mob of people, it is going to be more than two individuals who get hurt due to the fact that everyone is so close together.
The lunch ladies also have to deal with this issue as students cutting the line makes their job more complicated. “Yes I think it’s a problem, a lot of things can happen, students don’t listen because everybody is in a mess,” lunch lady Alma Ruiz said. Yet according to security, this is not an issue because no one has come forward. “We haven’t had people come forward to speak on it, but we have people in the inner court checking but we don’t have someone actually in the line supervising it,” Salcedo said.
As someone who gets lunch everyday from the hut I can say that it’s hard to believe that no one has come forward demanding change on this issue. Even the lunch ladies have tried to take matters into their own hands by telling students who try to cut to go to the back of the line or they’re not getting their lunch. From what I saw first hand, this didn’t work on some students as they continued to cut in line despite the orders from the lunch ladies.
It’s time for change, this issue has been around for too long now and the solution to it seems clear. Having control and harmony in the lunch line will not only make things easier for the students but for staff as well. If this issue got solved, students would get their lunch quickly, they wouldn’t run the risk of getting hurt, the lunch ladies wouldn’t stress about serving lunch, and we all would have a much more peaceful environment.
