Lunch period at Half Moon Bay High School is only 40 minutes long, and for many students, getting away to their favorite cafés means they can’t wait around for chit-chat, on-campus spirit activities or even a slow crosswalk at an intersection.
But now school officials are reconsidering the open campus at lunchtime — a privilege students have always enjoyed at the school. The high school administration is studying whether the school would function better if students were forced to stay put for lunch.
 Half Moon Bay High School students stream down the hill at lunchtime. School officials are mulling changing the open-campus policy for the next school year. |
“At lunch there’s an extra opportunity for kids to get into trouble, and that really ties our hands,” Streshly said. “Parents send their kids to school thinking they’re supervised. And this is a time when they’re not supervised. Students could be anywhere during this time.”
Streshly is investigating how students, faculty and parents would feel about closing the campus at lunchtime. She expects to decide whether to change the campus lunch policy for the 2010-2011 school year based on their input and the capabilities afforded by the school’s limited budget.
Restricting students to stay on campus would require the high school to expand its food program and could also require more staff members to monitor students at lunchtime.
The latest call to close the campus comes as high-school parents have expressed growing concern about alcohol and drug use among teenagers. Parents have contacted Streshly asking her to end open lunch as a way to clamp down on teen delinquency and substance use.
Student body president Karen Lee says those fears are exaggerated.
“Drugs and alcohol will be an issue whether the school’s open or closed,” she said. “You rarely hear about kids going off campus to drink or smoke … I don’t think parents are making a realistic argument.”
But Lee says closing the campus at lunchtime isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Student events at lunch usually flounder from mediocre attendance because so many teenagers are leaving school. As example, Lee noted that a lunchtime homecoming walk earlier this month only drew about 100 students.
“That’s not a lot of kids … and there’s no way we can have good attendance if everyone leaves for lunch,” she said.
Police Chief Don O’Keefe says the biggest problem with the open-campus policy is the safety of students who are hastily walking or driving off campus. Students crossing busy intersections such as Highway 92 and Highway 1 frequently jaywalk or make rolling stops if they’re driving, he said.
“Our biggest concern is the traffic issue associated with large groups of kids going off campus,” O’Keefe said. “We have kids crossing the street where they’re not supposed to … and if we get another call we can’t monitor those intersections.”
If the school does close at lunchtime, that would be bad news for Tommy Suen, owner of China Kitchen. The Asian café at Strawflower Village is a popular destination for the lunchtime rush of students. If the campus closed, those loyal customers would be lost.
“Of course, closing the campus would affect us a lot, along with Jamba Juice and Starbucks,” Suen said. “We need more business, not less, in this recession … I would say that to the school officials.”
Streshly said that changing the open-campus policy doesn’t necessarily mean students would be entirely forbidden from leaving for lunch. Streshly suggested that the school could extend open-campus privileges to upper-classmen or students with the permission of a parent.
That’s how her high school handled the lunch policy when she was a student years ago in San Diego, she said. But for her, having a partial open-campus didn’t matter because her parents refused to sign off on her leaving school for lunch.
“They didn’t want me running around town,” Streshly said. “I’d see other kids coming back with McDonalds, while I couldn’t leave … Of course, I wasn’t very happy.”
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