Students scramble to the cafeteria just for a chance to get their lunch in time to take a breath and sit down with their friends. The cafeteria has been a hot spot for students to get food from the school and for a place to sit and talk with friends. But students seem to have a hard time with other fellow students cutting in line and the quality of the food.
The school lunch isn’t the greatest. Some students wait for almost 15 minutes for a 40 minute lunch, just for it to be the same food they’ve been eating since elementary school. Some students wait even longer because there is little to no supervision from staff to stop students from cutting in line. I think it’s not fair for students to have to wait almost half of their lunch for a below average meal and have to see people cut in front of them.
After asking 50 students who buy lunch regularly, 22 of them said they got their lunch in less than ten minutes on average. The other 28 of them said they got their lunch in 11 minutes or more,
Austin Independent School District states that the healthy meals prepared at the beginning of every day exceed the nutrition guidelines. The lunch may be healthy, but I’ve seen students who have had a raw drumstick, another example I saw was an expired carton of milk with strawberries that were frozen solid.
Line cutting in the cafeteria has always been a big issue, staff hasn’t done much to stop it. Students who stay in line and don’t cut end up getting stuck behind people that do cut for an unreasonable amount of time. All that staff has done is put someone in front of the Grill Line, yet it doesn’t stop much.
A potential solution to the issues of the cafeteria could be started with adding a potential app for ordering food. The cafeteria could make a way for students to choose from a list before lunch starts and order what they would like to eat. Students would then go during lunch and pick up their order. Orders could be organized from type of food or by alphabetical order. This could eliminate the stampede of people trying to get to the line first. It could also eliminate the Line cutting and the whole line entirely. Food quality issues could be solved by charging more for lunch for better quality, or it could be solved by buying popular snacks students like, charging more for the snacks than what the school would pay for could lead to profit, this means the school could be able to afford better quality ingredients.
We as students should speak out for ourselves, especially when it’s about nutrition. We should email administrators about the issue or show up to the monthly meetings the district holds. These meetings open the floor to the public and that’s when students can inform AISD about these issues.
