Now Is the Time to Get Rid of School Cafeterias
This past year, schools across the country undertook a massive endeavor: reopening buildings to students during the middle of a global pandemic. Back-to-school plans focused on everything from the number of kids in classrooms and PPE supplies to class changes and outdoor learning. This past fall, reopening plans have been further complicated by battles over mask and vaccine mandates. One of the unexpected casualties of school reopening plans, though, might be school cafeterias — and the rushed, stressful lunches that happen within them.
Schools, of course, still served food to students. But many districts — such as New York City’s — required students to eat lunch in their classrooms to avoid massive gatherings in the cafeteria this past year. While many teachers may be upset at potentially losing a brief respite from their students, shifting lunch from cafeterias to classrooms is a change we should all welcome for the long run.
In the right context, meal time can be a place for adults and children to bond, to decompress, and to learn from each other. Stanford Children’s Health says:
“When a family sits down together, it helps them handle the stresses of daily life and the hassles of day-to-day existence. Eating together tends to promote more sensible eating habits, which in turn helps family members manage their weight more easily….Dinner is a perfect opportunity to build self-esteem in children. By listening to what children have to say, you are saying, ‘I value what you do; I respect who you are and what you’re doing; what you do is important to me.’”
Students eating a school lunch in Schenectady, New York (Library of Congress, 1943)
Lunch in school cafeterias, however, rarely presents any of these benefits. Instead, schools in the United States have accepted lunch as a quick, utilitarian way to stuff calories into kids as quickly as possible. Under pressure to extract more teaching time in an already cramped school day, policymakers and administrators have cut the amount of time for lunch to an average of just 25 minutes for elementary school students and 30 minutes for high school students. This, however, typically accounts for the entire lunch period — including walking to and from the cafeteria and waiting in line for food. In reality, students may have as few as 10 minutes actually sitting at a table with their food.
The lunch period barely leaves time to eat, much less have a meaningful conversation.
And because adults rarely have lunch with their students in cafeterias, many potential social and educational opportunities during lunchtime are squandered. Anyone who has been inside of a middle school cafeteria can tell you why teachers don’t want to be there. Dr. Jan Poppendieck writes in her book Free for All: “The first thing I noticed was the noise level — no wonder teachers dislike lunch duty! The furniture, the acoustics, the trays, and just the sheer number of energetic young people packed into the cafeteria created a decibel level that certainly discouraged conversation if not digestion.”
School lunches have not always been like this. In the one-room schoolhouses of the 1800s, students either had lunch in their classrooms with their peers and teacher, or they went home for lunch. Going home for lunch was especially common in urban schools. As more and more Americans began to work in factories, though, families enjoying lunch together at home became less feasible, and more students ate lunch at school.
In the early 1900s, providing lunch for students fell on the shoulders of different volunteer organizations — especially charities run by women. They would sell meals to students from pushcarts for one to three pennies. Following World War I, though, providing school lunch for students who could not afford it increasingly fell on local school boards. It was during this time that more and more schools started having their own cafeterias, too. This trend continued following World War II, with the number and size of schools expanding to accommodate the surge of baby boomers; new schools were built with cafeterias in them.
Women volunteers preparing a school lunch in Reedsville, West Virginia (Library of Congress, 1935)
Following the wave of teachers’ strikes in the 1960s, it became common for teachers to have a “duty-free lunch” period as a contractual right. As a result, administrators and policymakers now have two competing needs to work with: they need to monitor students in the cafeteria, but any teacher who is in the cafeteria must be compensated with more free time at some other point in the day. In order to make this work, teachers would no longer have lunch with their students — a few select teachers are moved to monitorial and policing roles to be as efficient as possible. Those who are not monitoring would be remiss to step anywhere near the cacophony of the cafeteria.
As a result, students are rushed to eat as much food as possible in a short period of time, and rather than having a collegial, relaxing meal, the lunchroom becomes another outlet for students — especially middle and high school aged students — to engage in a power struggle with adults who are policing them, not sharing a meal with them.
*****
Many districts, however, seem to be squandering an opportunity to shift the culture of school lunches. Lunch time is still viewed through the lens of a management problem: it is a time where students’ behavior needs to be managed, any extra work from teachers’ needs to be compensated for extra work, and time spent eating is time not spent learning. Efficiency is still the end goal.
There are numerous reasons why this culture has been hard to change, from state requirements for seat time to contracts with teachers’ unions to Covid safety protocols. But it would be well worth the energy for policymakers and administrators to try to figure out a way to use lunchtime as a way to build relationships among students, teachers, and staff. On a post in the Facebook group “Teaching During Covid-19” — which boasts over 100,000 educators from across the country — teachers described schools that made predictable, but disappointing, changes to lunch: mostly using lunch for extra class time or having students sitting silently at their desks or spread out a cafeteria.
In some instances, teachers shared lunchtime with students—although oftentimes these teachers were not compensated for their extra work. In other instances, schools brought in other staff members to cover lunch periods. But even when kids were not expected to do work, teachers and students were so exhausted that the period became a time for students to sit and eat quietly while occupying themselves, rather than a chance to build community. This could also be a result of teachers still having to focus on behavior management and policing rather than conversation; as many parents know, sometimes it is easier to put a screen in front of a kid when you are exhausted. Teachers said:
“Our kids are in the classroom and were supervised by a para so teachers had a duty free lunch. They listened to music, watched movies, learn-to-draw videos after they ate. It was awful--dirty, smelly...It always took me too long after lunch to settle them down to learn again.”
“We had lunch in our classroom. I just played a video for them. We had paras cover the class so we could leave the room and get a break.”
“Our students ate in their classrooms; we played music and tried to make it as relaxing as possible. Teachers who offered their space were paid a daily rate.”
“For most of the year students ate in the classroom. We allowed them to watch a show or movie to help them face forward. There was a person on duty outside of the classrooms that monitored 4 classrooms at a time. Teachers were allowed to leave but I would many times choose to eat in my room. I was very surprised at how well it went and that I actually didn’t mind it at all! In many ways eliminated lunchroom drama that would normally happen.”
“Students (HS) ate in the classroom at their desks after going to the cafeteria to get their lunch. I didn’t show videos. They just played on their phones and ignored each other like they normally do.”
In many cases, though, teachers had a hard time adjusting to different expectations about lunch in classroom, especially when it mainly involved extra work for teachers, messier classrooms, and no extra compensation or time:
“We had lunch in the classroom. They picked it up in the lunchroom and ate in the classroom or outdoors, on nice days. No free time for us teachers, though.”
“We had students in our classrooms, but it was a duty-free lunch for classroom teachers. Either paras or specialists were with the kids. I would prefer they be in the cafeteria so I can eat in my room if I choose.”
“We had half the classes eat in room and half ate in the cafeteria. It was just a lunch period. We didn’t like it. We are very ready for them to all eat in the cafeteria again.”
Some teachers, however, reported being able to use the time for socializing with students.
One teacher wrote: “Our students ate in the classroom with us. We were told not to use the time for instruction—sometimes we had lessons from the guidance department and sometimes we just talked with them (I teach high school—it was cool to watch them grow). Many times we played a movie during that time and then delivered instruction. My group managed to make it through most of the marvel series throughout the year. We made it work—definitely don’t want to do that again though.”
Another said: “We had our elementary kids eat in the classroom with us, the classroom teachers! It was a regular lunch period. It wasn’t so bad. It was nice to get to talk to them and we also used that time to watch read aloud book videos. They also had a recess so us teachers could get a few minutes to ourselves!”
In order to make lunches enjoyable for teachers, more deliberate guidance is needed to help students and teachers build relationships with each other. But this also requires that teachers have adequate time during the day for other things like planning so they don’t feel pressured or angry about having to give up work time to eat a slow lunch with students. And educators and administrators would need to shift the dialogue around school lunch — that lunch can be about more than just cramming calories into students in the least disruptive way possible. All of this would require bigger shifts in school cultures than just adjusting the lunch period.
*****
There are plenty of places where teachers do have lunch with their students regularly, and the effects are clear. In fact, the United States is an outlier in how it does school lunch. In an interview with me in August 2020, Dr. Poppendieck said: “In Sweden during the lunch period, both students and faculty ate in beautiful, well-lighted cafeterias with plants, above ground….Faculty tended to eat at tables with other faculty members. They didn’t tend to eat with students. But they were still in the same room. It was a much more civil atmosphere.”
In her book Free for All, Dr. Poppendieck paints a picture of what school lunch with students could look like: “The atmosphere is really very different, however, where teachers sit with their students, as I saw them doing in the huge, bare dining halls of the United Talmudic Academies in Brooklyn. UTA is one of the school systems serving the Satmar Hassidic community, and both the schools and the students are overwhelmingly impoverished. The meal was simple, but the students appeared to relish it, and even though the acoustics and furnishings were far from ideal, a room filled with several hundred students maintained a noise level that permitted students to converse with each other and with their teachers. I saw teachers eating with their students in other places around the country — not patrolling the cafeteria, but sharing the meal — and these were almost always the places where the meal hour was the least stressful, the most relaxed, the most conducive to learning.”
The shutdown of cafeterias this past year — and the requirement for students to have lunch in classrooms with teachers — presents us with a great opportunity to change what mealtime looks like in schools into something that students and teachers look forward to and that provides a sense of comradery and community. This is an especially worthwhile undertaking, given the social isolation that many of us have faced the past six months. According to Dr. Kip Smilie of Missouri Western University, eating lunch with your students can be humanizing. “I do think you make these connections that can’t be done as easily in the classroom,” he said during an August 2020 interview with me. “And the hope is that once you start building these relationships, that takes off in the classroom as well.”
For teachers, there is also much more autonomy in talking with your students about a range of topics. Smilie says, “I would eat a lot of times in my classroom during lunch and kids would sometimes come in and eat with me. We would have actual real conversations, because it kind of allowed for that…It does give you some agency that a lot of times you don’t have as much of within the curriculum, within the confines of the academic classroom.”
While it may be tempting to convert lunch time into more instructional time this year — given that the amount of time students will be in schools is already limited — it would be wise for schools to consider, instead, the myriad benefits of an unstructured lunch with students and faculty. Poppendieck writes:
“Anyone who has raised a child, however, knows that adults must model healthy behavior and adults must make the rules. Research suggests that many children actively fear unfamiliar foods and require repeated exposure and perhaps a bit of cajoling or peer pressure before getting up the nerve to try them. But the adult role models and the opportunities for cajoling are missing if the teachers shun the cafeteria and its food, and the positive peer pressure won’t occur if the peers are buying snack foods.”
When I spoke with Dr. Poppendieck, she added: “I think this could be a turning point…..It’s time to rethink school lunch in a much more profound way in more than just the nutrition standards.”
For teachers and administrators thinking of how to make the most of having lunch with students, Dr. Poppendieck has some suggestions: “Start by agreeing on what are the safety parameters — what do we have to do because of Covid. And then how can we maximize positive interactions. Get them to talk about what they liked or disliked about lunch the way it was last year. Direct their attention to the other aspects of lunch: time to eat, waiting in line….Get the kids to think about what would give them the best lunch experience so that it’s not just another instructional period.”
