New Schedule For NHS: Lunch For All Students

By Eliza Hallabeck

After months of effort, a new schedule for the Newtown High School was presented for the Board of Education during its last meeting. The school was contacted earlier this year by the Department of Agriculture because some students were unable to have lunches on Mondays.

The new schedule is similar to the old schedule, but it allows students to have a lunch period every day of the week. The old schedule had a five-day rotation, and every Monday all of the eight possible courses were held without a designated lunch period. If students had open periods they could eat during those times, but for some students these fell in the early morning or late afternoon.

The new schedule has an eight-day rotation that is designated by letters of the alphabet and assigned to the school calendar in advance. If days are cancelled due to the weather, that day’s schedule will drop and the next one will be held as normal. The schedule will be posted around the school to allow students to know which day it is.

This still offers eight periods for classes, but the administration meetings, where students met with faculty every other Monday for about 20 minutes, are no longer in the schedule. Instead a five-minute homeroom period was added at the start of everyday to keep the students connected and allow faculty to take attendance and remind the students which day the schedule is following.

In February, NHS Principal Charles Dumais received a letter from the USDA, he told the Board of Education. “I had never gotten a letter from the USDA before,” he told the board, “and this is part of a letter that we received in February from the State Department of Education. And what it pretty much says is that we are in violation as far as Monday lunch is concerned, because we don’t offer lunch for kids between 10 am and 12 pm [noon] on Mondays.”

He said they submitted a plan to the state to finish the school year, which was approved, and, he said, that the school was told to fix the issue from this point forward.

Mr Dumais said the five-day schedule was actually counterproductive to allowing the students to have lunches, and he asked a group of teachers, among other things, to look at the schedule and come up with a solution.

“We have taken a look at a schedule that will essentially have the same times for class periods on each of the days of the week,” said Mr Dumais.

According to Assistant Principal Scott Clayton, a nine-person schedule committee met for approximately eight hours in total to come up with a solution to the scheduling problem. He said the committee looked at about 15 other school schedules from schools in the state with either similar enrollment to the school or proximity to Newtown. Mr Clayton, who chaired the schedule committee, said he thinks the schedule will work well for NHS.

“The last thing we want to do is change the schedule again in a year,” said Mr Clayton, “because that is disruptive.”

In the new schedule lunches will still be offered to students in lunch waves, which is how the old schedule worked on every day but Monday. One period each day is longer than the rest in order to accommodate half an hour of time to eat and travel to lunch. The amount of time the students will spend in that period will still be the same as the other classes held that day, but lunch time will be taken out of it.

“The faculty openly and warmly received this schedule,” said Mr Clayton.

The committee was comprised of Mr Clayton, faculty, a student, and also had input from a parent. Mr Clayton said all of the departments in the school were represented in the committee.

Despite the mandatory homeroom period each day, students in their senior year at NHS will still have the privilege to come in late and leave early if they have an open period at the beginning or end of the day.