High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.
But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.
In a school where SAT scores are the talk in the hallways and more than half the seniors are accepted to their first-choice college, Briarcliff’s principal, Jim Kaishian, said mandatory lunch is intended to reduce stress on teenagers so caught up in the achievement frenzy they barely have time to eat or sleep.
This year, 12 percent of Briarcliff’s 665 students have no free periods, while an additional 30 percent have classes the entire time the cafeteria is open.
“We see kids rushing to eat; we hear about stress levels going up,” Mr. Kaishian said. “We’ve watched as some kids implode and bend under the weight of having to go period after period without a break.”
Kids aren’t stressed and ready to implode because they don’t have lunch. They’re stressed and ready to implode because they’re trying to survive the insanity that someone, somewhere (I’m not sure who is actually making the rules at this point) is creating to tell kids that they will be failures if they can’t keep up. Twenty minutes for lunch can’t fix the problems that administrators and parents are causing. What in the world is wrong with us…Those who are supposed to be the responsible ones? No chicken patty on a bun can replace common sense.