Oak ridge schools cafeteria menu calendar

#Oak ridge schools cafeteria menu calendar series#

'And if the lines are too long, the kids get discouraged.'Д®ating in shifts keeps the lines down even on Fridays. 'There's enough space to accommodate all the kids, but the lines get too long,' said cafeteria supervisor Gail Dobbins. Peebles School, students eat in four 25-minute shifts. Staggering the lunch times keeps the younger students from getting frustrated and from colliding with each other in the hallways. Sandwich food service director Barbara Archambeault said the self-sufficient cafeteria, which receives no money from the school budget, counts on the snack sales to provide a good meal for hundreds of students for just $1. 'I always get peanut butter and jelly,' he said.

He said he has time to eat lunch on most days. The 11-year-old said he buys lunch every day, but also spends an additional 70 cents for treats. As he munched on cheese snacks and a pair of frosted Zebra Cakes, his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich sat on his tray, still wrapped in plastic as lunch came to an end. Still, much of his lunch remained uneaten. Last week, sixth-grader Matt Christiani spent only a few minutes waiting in lines. 'If they're waiting in line, they're not eating what their parents gave them money to eat,' Huggins said. Given the limited time to eat, this concerns the principal. Huggins said many students spend more time in the snack line than in the regular lunch line, often leaving their trays on a table buy a dessert. To keep lines short at the 1,024-student building, the school offers different lines featuring a hot meal, sandwiches or a salad bar.

At Oak Ridge, two classes enter at a time during a series of 20-minute lunches from 11 a.m. Lines are not so bad at elementary schools, where teachers typically escort their classes to the cafeterias. 'A lot of the teachers know how far we have to go and won't mark you tardy even if you are,' senior Ben Dranetz said one day last week as he finished his meal in an empty cafeteria after the school's first lunch shift had ended. And high school students say they have distractions younger kids don't: They change classes throughout the day, weaving through crowded hallways to their lockers all over the larger building.ДЄnd at no time is the mayhem greater than when the lunch bell sounds, when hundreds of adolescents stream toward the same destination. In Barnstable High - with almost 1,800 students divided among four 25-minute lunches - time is a factor. 'But there are so many kids and only so many minutes in the day,' agreed second-grade teacher Pat Menesale, 'so we're always looking at the clock.' 'You have to bring them down, put them through line, make sure they're set and then you eat as quick as you can.'

'You really don't get 20 minutes,' third-grade teacher Katherine Mone said.

At Oak Ridge, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, the quickie lunches seem even shorter for teachers. Hurried lunches are a fact of life for everyone in schools. 'I hear that people are taking one-hour lunches out there.' 'School is not the real world,' joked Principal Paul Huggins of Sandwich's Oak Ridge School. And with student numbers increasing across the Cape, it is unavoidable. Many teachers and officials argue that rushing through lunch is expected of students everywhere and always has been. But around the Cape, it is not uncommon for students of all ages to be asked to wolf down their food in less than 20 minutes during what is also the most social part of their day.

#Oak ridge schools cafeteria menu calendar series#