In the 2022 school year, there have been a few changes such as no required masks on the bus and new two hour block schedules on Wednesdays and Thursdays. One new change however, hits differently.

Power lunch, or Power hour, is a brand new lunch schedule of one hour lunches each day. It was put in place to give students more time to eat lunch, do homework, and chat with friends. However, as many of you have heard, the latter of these reasons has gone off the rails. 

There had been only three days of Power lunch, when Mr. Nelson announced over the intercom the possibility of Power lunch being taken away for two weeks. Power lunch is ambitious, with more students than seats, many kids have to sit in hallways to eat, blocking people from walking through hallways. According to Nelson, people have been throwing milk containers and generally acting quite goofy. How did we get here? 

If you weren’t here last year, you probably still have seen the ABC style lunches, usually splitting lunches into three lunches. Last year, we did three lunches: A, B and C lunches. Your lunch was dependent upon classes you picked so you could end up alone eating or with strangers. A surprise to no one, no one really liked this style. Back in elementary and in middle school, lunches were dependent upon grade, allowing everyone to sit with friends, however, this too was pandemonium and lunches usually were under one hour. So now we can see how we arrived at this new lunch style. Now the question is, can we improve upon it? 

Students have multiple opinions were on the matter. Some of them believe this lunch format is better than in the past. 

Noah Block liked how last year’s lunches were well separated and actually quite nice depending on who you had lunch with. When asked how he would change this year’s lunches, Block said he would want “more seating areas and 10 more minutes. I always thought the idea was better than how it was implemented.”

Block sees some concerns with Power lunch.

“People don’t take some aspects of it seriously, but it’s understandable,” he said. “We’re teenagers so some aspects like the quiet area are obviously not gonna work” 

Overall, this year has been very different from last year and there have been a lot of ideas thrown at the wall. Hopefully, the good ideas stick.