Next year they are going to an hour lunch period. If you have a low gpa you will be required to pick up your food and head to tutoring or if you have missed school you can make up work during the long lunch. If not you will have time to play ultimate frisbee or pick up soccer in the quad. The drama department plans (I know because my dh is the drama teacher) to go all glee and put on flash mob performances in the quad. This is new to our school and should be interesting to see if 2500 (minus the ones who will leave campus to eat) kids can be fed all at once.
All the public school around here around do lunch at the same time and there are 2500+ in my school. So it can be done. A lot of students don't bother with the cafeteria, there is no where to sit there anyway. Lunch time is when the kids have clubs, and there are many student clubs. It's also a time to hang out with friends.
Our high schools have 6 periods + lunch. At my ds' school the full school eats lunch at the same time, and it seems to work really well. The students are allowed to eat anywhere in the school, so they can eat in the library or in teachers' classrooms. One of the things that seem to be positive (to me) about this policy are that all the teachers are available at the same time (during their lunch hours) so if you have a question for a teacher outside of class, it's easy to know where and when to find them. The teachers are also good about letting kids eat lunch in their room, so it eases the teacher-vs-student divide that can build up in a school where teachers and students never interact outside their regular classroom. There are also a lot of clubs that meet during lunch, facilitated by teachers who don't have to be teaching at that time, and everyone can participate in any club because everyone is free at the same time.
The downside is that the lines in the cafeteria are long, but my ds really isn't into eating cafeteria food anyway
There is also a zero hour class, but it's for music and theater classes - I am not sure that anything else meets then. And it's *early* EARLY. Participating in school sports can be used as PE credit, and everyone (no matter how not talented they are) is allowed to participate on any team the want to. That's been great for my ds, who is not an athlete, but is extroverted, likes being on a team, and doesn't want to have to take PE as one of his 6 classes, because that would mean he'd have to drop either music or his foreign language, both of which he loves.
polarbear
