Should Students Be Able To Get Outside Food For Lunch?

Bella Yancey

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At Powell High School, the policy is that you may not leave campus to get food, nor can anyone else bring you outside food. This leaves students to either pack a lunch or get lunch at the school cafeteria. While neither of these are bad options, some students still wish to have more freedom when choosing their lunch. But the question is, do students at Powell High School deserve the privilege of getting off-campus food for lunch? If the administration allowed every student to leave during their lunch period to buy food, it would leave many students unaccounted for. This would quickly turn into a safety and liability issue and some students may not return to school at all. There is also the problem of time. Each lunch period is only 25 minutes bell to bell on a daily schedule, which leaves little time for the idea of leaving campus for lunch to even be realistic. In order to make leaving campus for lunch possible, the administration could erase Paws Time and use this extra time to make the lunches longer. Paws Time is not long enough to get anything efficiently done, which results in there being an extra 30 minutes in the day that we as a school could use more valuably. By making the lunches longer, students would have enough time to get food and get back to school in a timely manner. There is also the issue of too many students being off campus at once, which would be difficult to keep track of. But, what if only select students were allowed to leave? For example, you would have to be passing all your classes; you could not have had any behavior issues in the past month, and you would need a teacher's note saying that you were trustworthy enough to leave campus to get lunch. This could be another way to reward hardworking students and could even be incorporated into the renaissance cards that passing students receive. Plus, if the administration used the incentive of getting outside food on the renaissance cards, it would help limit the traffic of students coming and going due to the fact that students would be only to use the reward once or twice in a grading period. While I realize that implementing this is easier said than done, I still think it would be worth the administration's looking into, and I know of students who would appreciate the recognition for all their dedication.