By Cole Mingledorff
Photo by Cole Mingledorff
At the end of second block, hundreds of high school students, 8th through 12th grade, stare at the clock, waiting for it to strike 11:30. As their stomachs rumble, the bell rings, and they run to the cafeteria, wait in line, and get served the school lunch that the lunch lady thoughtfully prepares for them. Ms. Bourgeois scans their ID, and $4.75 gets debited from their lunch account. After they wait in line for what feels like forever, they finally get to sit down and eat their school lunch.
These people choose ordering a school lunch over making a lunch at home. So this begs the question–what do the students think about school lunches? In previous years in this newspaper, students have shown their opinions towards the school lunch, but in the past few years since the last article, have the opinions changed at all?
Let’s look at a few recent comments from current students:
”It can be great, but it’s also terrible sometimes. Overall, they have gotten better,” explained 8th grader TreMichael Stirgus. “School lunch is mid, not a lot of consistency at all.” Stirgus has been ordering school lunches for two years.
“The school lunch is over-hated. Most of the meals are good, and the chocolate milk is great,” is what an anonymous freshman said. “People say that the school lunch is bad just to fit in, but really, it is pretty solid.” This freshman qualifies for free school lunch.
Let’s look at some more critical viewpoints.
“Sometimes it’s good. You can tell if it was frozen before,” said Isaiah Prudhomme of the 10th grade.
”Sometimes it hits, and sometimes it doesn’t. With the school lunch, it’s too chunky,” remarked freshman Bentley Brasseux. “Like the spaghetti, it’s chunked up. It’s too dry, but at the same time, too soggy. With the sauce, it doesn’t make sense to have the sauce on the side.” Bentley has been ordering school lunch since the beginning of the year, but it should be noted that Bentley doesn’t order lunch everyday.
Right now, we can determine that these students think that the meals are good, but not very consistent, having an equal chance of being either great or horrible.
Willow High School lunch lady and Child and Nutrition Manager Catherine Francois has insight on the children’s favorite lunches and breakfasts, changes for future lunches, opinions on the student’s nutrition, and changes for students who can’t afford lunch.
“Students have so many favorites. It’s between the pizza and the chicken. They like Mexican corn. Their favorite breakfast depends on the day for them. One moment, they like the donuts or the poptarts. Other moments, they like the turkey bacon and the oatmeal.”
“In the future, they are trying to push for more vending machine foods, putting the school lunches in the vending machines, but we’ve been fighting against that because we feel like we try to cook from home.
More importantly, we asked her about making school lunches more affordable so students can eat everyday without having to worry about the cost.
“Right now, we have some schools that are on CEP, which means they are eligible for free lunch based on the economic income in their area. Here, we’ve been trying to get that, but we don’t meet the quota.” By meeting the eligibility requirements for CEP, which stands for Community Eligibility Provision, all Willow school students will be able to eat for free.
Remember, now, our mission is to find out if the opinions have changed. Let’s look at Willow students’ opinions from previous years. Here are some of the quotes from Charles Christiansen’s article on school lunch written in 2023 and Alex Eskew’s article on school lunch written in 2024.
“The nachos made my stomach hurt,” noted Alex Eskew.
“One day I ate school lunch, and it made me rethink my life,” said Ariel Arellano.
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on,” Luke Saucier said. “I just got some meatballs and sauce, so I guess they ran out of noodles.”
A student who asked to stay anonymous said, “The lunch was OK some days and horrid others.”
Now we have several viewpoints, so what was the consensus from previous years? Overall, the consensus was that the school lunch was bad and needed drastic improvement.
We have the consensus from both this year and the years prior, but we need to determine if the opinions have changed at all. This year, they claimed that the food was inconsistent, but in the previous years, they said that the food was simply awful. So the answer is yes, the opinions have changed. It may be a small difference, but the consensus has changed.
We determined that the school lunch, although very slightly, has improved from previous years. If we keep improving at this rate, in 30-something years, the school lunch will be amazing. Or maybe there will be a leap forward. Who’s to say?
But for now, the verdict is that the meals are sometimes good, but overall inconsistent. All we can hope for now is that the lunch gets better…
Except, if that happened, the lunch line would get even longer.
