Ringgggg. I know that I’m not alone in saying that the lunch bell (following the one that rings at 3:15) is the second most delightful sound that chimes through the Whitney Young halls. Lunch is a time where one can talk with friends, make a quick Target run, and above all, eat! However, this year, that bell rings significantly later for some than it does for others.
Changes to the Whitney Young bell schedule for the 2023-2024 school year moved enrichment to the class that sits between first and second block, pushing all the lunch periods back. This is different from the bell schedule from the 2022-2023 school year, where enrichment was at the end of the day. With this adjustment, D lunch is now starting at nearly 1pm. Both myself and my peers agree that this is simply too late. One of those peers is Junior Lucy Lin, who mentioned, “I get hungry during the day and I just want to eat my lunch, but I can’t.”
According to a study by Northwestern Medicine, the best time to eat lunch is four hours after breakfast. Since school starts at 8am and commute times have to be taken into consideration, most students probably aren’t eating breakfast past 7:30am. That means an ideal lunch time would be at 11am. D lunch begins almost two hours after this time. Along with that, not all students eat breakfast due to a morning time crunch, which makes the timing for this kind of student’s first meal of the day even more important.
The effects are exaggerated in a school setting, as classes take up a lot of energy, and eating is how that energy is replenished. At Whitney Young, students with D lunch have between three and four classes before their lunch period. That is a lot of material that students have to absorb while trying to ignore the growling of their stomachs. Senior Arushi Virmani says “I can’t focus at all during my 5C class because all I can think about is the pasta I’m going to have for lunch the next period.”
I do have to admit, D lunch does come with its perks though. For example, with the new baby dolphin schedule, those with D lunch get to leave school early. However, this opportunity only comes once a month and pushes the lunch start time back to 1:15. I also understand that this adjustment in the schedule allows for A lunch to start at a later time, but this is not an excuse as I believe the result is much more harmful. Freshman Morgan Tillis, who has D lunch currently and had A lunch last year while she was in eighth grade, agrees, commenting, “I didn’t particularly like having lunch really early, but I definitely preferred it to having lunch extremely late.” Along with this statement, new research shows that it’s healthier to eat earlier in the day rather than later, and that eating a larger breakfast can keep you fuller for longer compared to other meals; therefore, those that complained “A lunch was just another breakfast” were really getting additional health benefits compared to those that have a delayed lunch period this year.
Finding a balance for ideal lunch period times will continue to be a struggle moving forward; yet, it is crucial to make sure that the students within our school are not eating lunch too late like they are this year. I hope that sometime in the near future, we can come to a better bell schedule where students from all lunch periods are satisfied.
