Should Pitman Students Have Access to Open Campus Lunches?

With a nearby fast food restaurant, many students would love the opportunity to exit the campus during lunch periods and get their food elsewhere. Even with the amount of financial and traffic benefits that may come from open-campus lunches, there’d definitely be some negatives thrown into the mix.

Open-campus lunches can be given to students for their good grades, attendance and overall etiquette in school. Some schools see this as a positive way to reward and encourage students to begin and maintain these actions. Maintaining personal lives through spending time with family and taking care of chores or a pet could help be accomplished through open-campus lunches. Students having their lunches outside of school would benefit them more than just having freetime; no matter where students would head out during this time, walking will always be a benefit to their health.

Another positive to open campus lunch is that some students would have the opportunity to grow accustomed to the open lunches that many jobs have. This helps set students up for the occupations they’ll have later in their lives.

When asked for her insight on what she thinks would come out of open campus lunches,Olivia Gonzalez, a junior here at Pitman High, states, “Something good that will come from open lunches would be shorter lunch lines.” Shorter lunch times would leave more time for students to go to their extracurricular activities, like clubs, and just socialize in general.

Businesses nearby the school would also benefit from an open-campus lunch. The businesses that students have the time to access during lunch would likely see an increase in profit due to open campus lunches.

Even with these benefits, there is a very big chance students’ late arrival of their 5th period classes could be traced back to the school’s very short 30 minute lunch period.

A common argument against open-campus lunch would be the fact that traffic would get worse around school lunch times. Drivers in general would not only have issues with traffic prior to and after classes, but with open-campus lunches, their afternoon time can easily be taken up by traffic as well. Traffic doesn’t only take up time, but it could very easily cause car accidents. With an increase of traffic there would also be an increase of impatient and impulsive drivers, potentially resulting in fatal accidents. The chances of these crashes should be minimal, as the select amount of students able to leave school during lunch wouldn’t be enough to cause an influx of traffic.

Open-campus lunches’ positives and magnitude of negatives would definitely be affected by the overall nature and number of students who would be given permission to leave campus during the designated times.