You Can’t Stand In The Way Of Hungry Teens

Many, many moons ago, I was in high school in a small town in the central USA. We had an open campus (meaning we could leave for lunch) and a popular lunchtime event was to go to [Fast Food Chain] in a larger, nearby town. We had a forty-five-minute lunch period, and in forty-five minutes, you could drive to [Fast Food Chain], go through the drive-thru, and stuff your face on the way back.

Of course, there was also a school cafeteria. However, this cafeteria wasn’t actually at the high school; it was at the middle school, and it served the middle school, the high school, and an elementary school, bussing students in to eat their lunch.

In my senior year, the administration set up a new schedule, and one thing that it did was shorten the lunch period by five minutes. This was maybe not a big deal for some, but the folks that drove to [Fast Food Chain]? You could do it in forty-five minutes. You could not do it in forty.

They complained, but it fell on deaf ears. So, someone (and I really wish it had been me) came up with a brilliant idea: eat at the school cafeteria.

Suddenly, instead of about 30% of the high school students eating at the cafeteria, that number nearly doubled. The effect of this was that the elementary school, who ate after the high school, had to stand and wait because the cafeteria’s schedule was based on how many students they expected to show up.

So, we were eating in the cafeteria, and then nearly a hundred kindergarteners were just standing outside, waiting to come in. There wasn’t anything the cafeteria could do; they just didn’t have the capacity for more students. And there wasn’t anything the school could do, because they couldn’t tell us not to eat at the cafeteria; they were legally obliged to provide lunches to the students that wanted them.

It was very effective, and they restructured the high school’s schedule less than two weeks into the year to add those five minutes back so that they didn’t have dozens of hungry five-year-olds.