Almost everyone at Apex Friendship High School misses STAR lunch. For students, it provided extra time to complete assignments and meet with teachers, allowed them to attend club meetings, and allotted a full hour to eat lunch and go off campus. Additionally, teachers had extra time in their day to assist students and go to meetings instead of having to take care of those responsibilities on their own time. Why dispose of this beloved institution? One of STAR lunch’s biggest supporters, Principal Matt Wight himself, provides some highly anticipated answers.
When asked to give a short response on why STAR lunch has disappeared, Wight gave a clear response: “Student safety.” He went on to express concerns regarding the large student body at AFHS this year. “It comes down to math,” he says. “And that is, our freshman class is 800. Our sophomore class is 700. So that would mean during STAR lunch we would have 1,500 underclassmen coming to lunch, basically at the same time. We felt like that was unmanageable.” Wight explains that the school building does not provide enough space for students to eat together. According to the fire code, the cafeteria’s capacity only amounts to 500, and even when combined with outdoor and hallway seating, the maximum number of students that could fit would be 800.
Although many could assume that COVID-19 affected this decision to remove STAR lunch, that only contributed marginally. Wight addresses this as well, saying “We were required to try to spread people out at lunch as much as we could, and there was no way that we could spread out 1,500 kids.” He discusses the efforts made in order to increase distance between students during lunch, pointing out that the school had added more outdoor seating as well as lunch tables in the main hallways on the first floor. The media center also opens itself to students during the lunch period. Even so, Wight acknowledges that Covid-19 only factored in as a secondary issue regarding lunch times.
As previously mentioned, Wight has always been a huge advocate for STAR lunch, and that sentiment remains shared among his staff as well. He describes the difficulty in solving the lunch issue, saying that the administration team had come up with multiple possible alternatives to removing STAR lunch, but had been continuously faced with this game of numbers. One problem with allowing students to eat in classrooms during lunch became the increasing number of “floating teachers”, or teachers without a permanent room, meaning that there would be no place for those teacher’s students to go. Wight expressed disappointment over the loss of this lunch period, but said “It just became so convoluted and so complex that we felt like it couldn’t be done.”
Although the three new lunch periods don’t seem to be a favorite at AFHS, the impossibility of continuing to offer STAR lunch cannot be denied. And while our school may be sad to see it go, much of the AFHS faculty holds high hopes for the future of Patriot Time, a supplemental free period added to the AFHS schedule this year. Wight shares his thoughts on it, saying “My hope is that eventually Patriot Time will work out to be that intervention time for students that need to go and get help from teachers. We aren’t quite there yet, but we are trying to refine Patriot Time to give kids and teachers more flexibility.” While STAR lunch will not be returning to Apex Friendship High School anytime soon, Principal Wight and his staff will be continuing their efforts to provide an accommodating and rewarding school experience for all students.
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