Breakfast, lunch, dinner and restaurants
Students, through maintaining their GPAs, attendance and good standing are allowed to leave campus for one block during the day. On the surface, open campus lunch periods seem like a great idea . Students learn time management and can use the time to take a breather from a busy day of school.
Open campus lunches in high school are meant to give the students more freedom during the school day. In a lot of ways, open campus lunches would teach the students responsibility, while providing them a break from their busy school day. This also offers a reward for high-performing students.
By letting students go off campus for lunch , administrators could also save some money and use it for different things, such as new equipment for sports teams. The more students are able to go off campus , the fewer students stay at school to eat school food, which the school sells cheaply.
School lunch is critical to student health and well-being, especially for low-income students —and ensures that students have nutrition they need throughout the day to learn. Research shows that receiving free or reduced-price school lunches reduces food insecurity, obesity rates, and poor health.
An open campus lunch increases the risk that students will become truant. It can also lead to higher levels of tardiness for classes around the lunch hour.
There are no laws that make it illegal for a teacher to keep students after a bell. With that said, the law does protect students from unfair punishment. In that regard, a teacher can’t issue punishments that prevent a child from being able to eat lunch or go to the bathroom.
An open campus means that students have the freedom to leave the school campus during a free period or lunch hour.
“ Eating lunch outside would give the students time to relax and enjoy the day. It would also let the students let off energy. Kids these days have too much stress with school and others. About 75% of kids have too much stress and it can cause serious issues with their mental, emotional and physical health.
Taking a look at The Pros and Cons of Off- Campus Lunch and reading between the lines, it is certainly not illegal for high schools to allow students off their premises per se. But schools do have their own rules (as opposed to laws) that they expect to be obeyed.
Free time gives students the opportunity to play and experiment. It gives them a break from their daily pressures and allows them to be incorporate what they learned into their everyday activities. For many schools and parents, the use of free time as a educational tool is a bit counter intuitive.
Students who get less than 20 minutes to eat leave a lot of food uneaten on their trays, said Juliana Cohen, a public health and nutrition professor at Merrimack College and Harvard University’s school of public health. Students were also much less likely to select fruit for their meal .
Obesity, diabetes and even preliminary high blood pressure and eventual heart problems can begin with poor nutrition in schools . Additionally, kids eating high-fat, low-nutrition foods are more likely to perform less effectively on academic work at school .
Research shows that students who participate in the school meal programs consume more whole grains, milk, fruits, and vegetables during meal times and have better overall diet quality, than nonparticipants.