The lunch period at Pitman is only 30 minutes long. Most kids that go to Pitman come from either Turlock Junior High or Dutcher Middle School. The lunch times at those schools were around 50 minutes long (2023-2024 school year). This change has an impact on the incoming first-year students because they are used to an extra 20 minutes to get food and socialize with friends.
Something else that has an impact on students is that all four graduating classes have the same lunch period. This causes problems with receiving lunches. Every day I see long lines for food and crowded tables.
I asked Megan Ellis (first-year student), ‘How long does it typically take you to get lunch at Pitman High School?’ She said, “It takes about 15 minutes, I wait [un]till the lines get smaller, so I don’t have to wait so long.”
‘How did the switch from about 50 minutes to 30 minutes of lunch affect you?’ She continued by saying, “It definitely feels shorter, I get less time to hang out with my friends and less time to be out of a classroom.”
There are two solutions I can think of to solve this problem among many students. One; dividing the lunches. We could just create two lunch periods. This is how the lunches are at the Junior High, just a block away from Pitman (7th graders then 8th graders). We could have one period for first-year students and sophomores, and then another period just for juniors and seniors.
Or making lunch periods longer. I think that lunch periods should be at least 10 minutes longer (40 minutes), so everyone has time to socialize and eat their lunch.
I find it unfair that we have 6 classes every day for 50 minutes each (plus 29 minutes for pride time and a 50-minute A period for some students) and after that we don’t even get a full 50-minute period for lunch.
Not having enough time to eat all of your food during lunch could cause conflicts with teachers in their classroom. In almost every class, you’re not allowed to eat. I understand that teachers don’t want a mess in their room, but if you don’t have enough time to fuel yourself during the designated time too, then you should expect students to eat during their classes.
Something I personally noticed was that in the classes where you are allowed to eat, they are cleaner than the classes where you aren’t allowed to eat. This is probably because when you tell kids they can’t do something, they want to do it even more, just to make the teacher upset.
Students also get sick all the time at school. One cause of that could be that they aren’t eating enough, and they can get nausea from not eating enough or too little.