“I have to shove food down my throat in order to make it back to school on time,” said Taylor Cahow (12). She added, “What the heck can I do in 30 minutes?” This is true, 30 minutes just isn’t quite enough time for students here at PN to get what needs to be done, done.

Students are going to have a mental breakdown if they don’t get more time to eat their food. Issra Said (10) said, “Lunch is a time where you can take a mental break from all of  the stress around us.” We’re in school for seven hours and only get half an hour to ourselves. Kind of ridiculous, right? I mean if I work five hours at my job I automatically get a 30 minute break, so why can’t we get more since we’re here longer. Students number one job is to go to school, which technically means they are going to work.

According to a New York Times, taking regular breaks from mental tasks improves productivity and creativity — and that skipping breaks can lead to stress and exhaustion. This proves that we need more time to take a breather from our endless amount of studying and loads of worksheets.

What teachers don’t seem to understand is that we have seven classes to really focus hard on. How can we do that if we have extracurricular activities like sports, clubs, a part-time job and homework? “I’m not going to go home after a long football practice and work on homework because I didn’t  have time to in school,” said Shane Lipsey (12).  

Now, let’s say that we increase our lunch to 45 minutes. Students will not only have more time to eat their lunch, but an extra 15 minutes to work on their homework or other tasks they need to do. This means taking four  minutes from each class to go towards lunch and we all know that the last four minutes should actually be called Pack up and chill.

Underclassmen even have a say on this. “Our lunch lines are so long, I only have like 15 minutes to eat after getting my food. I don’t even leave campus and I barely have time to eat,” said Jason Freeman (9). This is a serious problem in our school for all grades. It doesn’t matter if we go home, go to McDonald’s, or eat school lunch; it’s not enough time. Some students live more than ten minutes away from our campus, and, yes, they live in district! Jet Valentine (12) lives about 12 minutes away from school by car. This means that he is in the car for 24 minutes of his lunch break, which doesn’t include walking out to his car in the cesspool we call our parking lot. That gives him a whopping six minutes to eat! Valentine said, “I’ve never once been able to go home for lunch. I never have time to relax and I always feel rushed.”

So my verdict is…let’s all boycott school! I’m totally kidding, but what we can do is try to make lunch time more efficient by expanding our measly little 30 minute lunch break to an “immense” 45 minute.