It’s no surprise that in an overpopulated school like Lafayette, one of many areas of concern is lunch. In an attempt to solve this problem, administration has created five lunches that are each 20 minutes. We are distributed based off of what class we have during third block. In theory, this would be a pretty good solution; however what I’ve noticed, is that some lunches are much more crowded than others.

The biggest issue would have to be time. Each lunch provides around 20 minutes for students to go from their classes to the cafeteria, make their way through crowded lunch lines, and eat their food. Doing all of this within a 20 minute time slot doesn’t sound realistic in the slightest. However, there’s not much we can do about time unless we make the school day longer and the vast majority of our school’s population probably wouldn’t approve of that.

It is very apparent that some lunches are significantly more crowded than others. At second lunch, it seems like lunch runs pretty smoothly and people go through lunch lines pretty quickly. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that at fifth lunch, many kids spend most of their lunch time in the lunch lines actually getting food and once they get out of the line with about five minutes to spare, it’s hard to actually find a place to sit. Since fifth lunch is also right before fourth block, students also crowd near the exit which just adds to the chaos. Emma Heilig, a student who has fifth lunch, says “There are way too many kids in fifth lunch, but there are almost no kids in third lunch”.

However, there is likely something we can do about the distribution of classes. As said earlier, we are distributed into our lunch blocks based off of what types of classes we have during third block. There’s a pretty equal amount of classes per lunch block, however several classes have a lot more students than others. For example, music and science classes both have fifth lunch. There are many students in music classes and science is a mandatory class, so the same can be said about science. And those aren’t even the only classes that have fifth lunch.

Administration should take the population of these classes into consideration in order for lunches to run as smoothly as possible. Multiple types of classes with lots of students should not be put in the same lunch block as that causes unnecessary chaos in the cafeteria.