New material things at a school are always exciting.
Luckily, I have been around the district long enough to enjoy those “new” things. Hard to believe our beautiful fieldhouse and media center are more than 30 years old already. And the football field and turf has been there for almost 15 years now. Those grand openings probably received more fanfare than the one I am going to share with you, but I have been extremely excited about this one.
Our “semi new” cafeteria opened to students on November 27. I am not sure we have everything figured out yet, but I wanted to share some of the positives.
The new space will allow us to comfortably seat more students at a time. If you did not know, we have been utilizing hallways as cafeteria space since COVID. Keeping students distanced and trying to retrieve educational time required some creative solutions to say the least. The new cafeteria space will allow for more than 300 seats per lunch period. Having the ability to seat kids comfortably makes things better for everyone, as students need time in their day to spread out and relax for a moment. Seating in close quarters makes the time hectic.
A second cool upgrade is the grab-n-go line. Students can simply come through and grab what they want from fresh salads to sandwiches, again, hopefully, giving them more time to eat and less time in line.
Third and most importantly to me, is the make up for educational time. In the recent past, with the smaller cafeteria, we had to have over two hours of the day dedicated to lunch.
This time is a tremendous effort when you consider the educational time, the supervision, the workload on classified and just getting things done.
With the new space, we look to move forward with lunch being closer to one and a half hours. Obviously this gives time back to students and staff and the main focus will be intervention time. Our future plans will use our AEI period to better focus on assisting students as the new time will not be interrupted by lunches and allow more creative solutions to assist kids. No, the band did not play and we did not invite the local dignitaries to a ribbon cutting ceremony, but this one is big for us. Thank you to the school board and the use of the special COVID funds to help with construction. Most importantly though, I want to thank the cafeteria workers behind the scenes and the students of SHS. Did you know for the most part, eight dedicated ladies got us through the last three years (at times, five).
Thank you to the magic that our cafeteria staff creates everyday feeding our students. And finally to the SHS student body—you guys ROCK. Carrying your lunches to various lobbies, dealing with the changes, figuring out the various schedules, you all have been wonderful in helping us get to this point. Thank you, and enjoy the new space.
