Fresh Idea Goes Sour
New changes took place during lunch this year, especially for Freshmen.
October 17, 2018
Most students see Eagle Halftime as a beautiful break in the middle of the school day. However, at the beginning of the year Eagle Halftime looked
different, not only for the upperclassmen, but the especially for new incoming freshmen got a new taste of traditional lunch.
When Eagle Halftime was brought back into the daily schedule after an almost two week long break, the freshman didn’t have an open lunch like the rest of the students here at North. They had meetings during lunch A with the school administrators and lunch in the upper and lower commons during lunch B. Lunch this year was much more limited for the ninth graders than last year, and many are scratching their heads as to why.
Principal Jason Herman saw that Eagle Halftime wasn’t used appropriately by certain students last year. He wanted to make sure that the new incoming students knew how to navigate Eagle Halftime properly. “[I wanted to give them] an opportunity to get to know their teachers, get to know what they’re comfortable with how our cafeteria runs, and go, ’Alright, I now know get how the school works’”, says Herman.
Herman also states the traditional lunch gives students the opportunity to realize, not only how the cafeteria works, but as well, understand the consequences of abusing Eagle Halftime. “I think that just generally”, Herman says, “that when we go to the four lunches, like the old school way, I think that it really allows students to appreciate Eagle Halftime”. The use of the four lunches is there to remind us what can be possibly lost if Eagle Halftime is not used appropriately.
But Herman says that freshmen this year can’t blame the freshmen from last year. It has nothing to do with them, it has a lot to do with how the first trial of Eagle Halftime went last year. “It’s moreover, they just didn’t, don’t know how the building works. Now that they know that, they should be doing just fine”, states Herman.
With restrictions on freshman Eagle Halftime, Herman feels that freshmen were also able to understand how our building works here at Olathe North for example, how our bell schedule works, or even how lunch itself works. “Now obviously, having the first half of there always being meetings with [the] code of conduct, and school, and the question-answer day with the principal, and all those different things, I think it helped them understand our school at a higher level”, Herman says.
This year was the guinea pig year. The school administrators tried something new to help the new incoming students transition properly from middle school to high school. But their placement in the commons during Halftime lunch B, is something that the administrators slightly regret. “We are still talking about kids who don’t quite get how we do things at Olathe North,” says Herman, “when you put five hundred kiddos, at the age of 13 and 14 years old, not really knowing what to do, they just do what they do, and that’s getting together, they’re loud and crazy. They don’t pick up after themselves.”
Administrators do plan on doing something like this in the future. With the meetings about the student code of conduct, and question-answer day with the principal, and much more. When code of conduct talks took place, it didn’t take as long for the upperclassmen. “It took me twenty minutes to do classroom talks with [the upperclassmen]”, says Herman. Except, for the freshmen it took much longer than one lunch halftime. “It takes us a week with the freshman cause they just have no background. So we’re going to continue do those talks, bring them in, help them understand, process all the different things”, he states, “there was two days of talks, there was meet the principal day, there was student conductor day.”
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