At the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, Desert Oasis implemented a new lunch schedule. This new schedule removed the third lunch period and alleviated the issues caused by having a lunch period that fell in the middle of class. However, despite this new schedule’s benefits, there’s also been many drawbacks.
Due to the school’s increasing size, lunches are now up to roughly 1,600 kids per period. This surge in numbers has brought up many grievances amongst students.
“Lunch is super crowded now and the amount of people makes it hard to do anything,” says 10th grader, Micheal Sando, “Sometimes you don’t even have enough time to get food before the bell rings because the line is just that bad.”
Along with the ability to get lunch, the new schedule also raises the safety of students into question, “It doesn’t seem remotely safe to have that many students in one area at any given time. It can be hard to fight through the crowds,” says senior Riley Webster.
Carley Larson, 10th grader, says that while there’s been some benefits, they don’t outweigh the negatives, “There’s more of a likelihood of having lunch with your friends but everything is way more crowded than last year and it’s harder to get through crowds at lunch or even during passing periods.”
While Sando, Webster and Larson all agree that only having two lunches has made things much harder, the opinion on whether or not Desert Oasis should return to its original lunch schedule differs.
“I think we need to go back to three lunches simply because this school is way too overpopulated to warrant only having two lunches,” says Sando.
However, Larson has a different opinion on the matter, “I would rather keep the lunches the same, since it’s been more manageable as kids have gotten used to it.”
It seems that as students have gotten used to the change, the increased size has gotten easier to handle and despite the complaints and concerns coming from students, it appears that for the foreseeable future, Desert Oasis has no plans to switch back to the original lunch schedule.
