Due to Covid precautions, the administration at the Masters School has made the choice to return to split lunches: one early lunch, taking place between 11:30 a.m. and 12:10 p.m., and one late lunch, taking place between 12:50 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. They were designed to ensure the safety and wellness of the school community. 

With the decision taking effect,  it seems the most frequently-asked question is “what lunch do you have?”  When the decision to revert to a schoolwide lunch was made at the start of the 2021-22 school year, the community was ecstatic. They got to eat with their friends and didn’t have to worry about not having a friend there to hang out with.

Classes already separate friends from each other on a daily basis and lunch was the one time where students were able to socialize with all their friends, but now that’s been taken away too. A few students, Lena Mereck and  Alessandra Manalac were asked to speak on the matter of how they felt personally.

10th grader, Alessandra Malanac, said, “ I don’t love it, it makes it harder to interact and see certain friends because lunch is where students chill and there are some lunches where you don’t have close friends so it makes it more stressful.”

11th grader, Lena Mereck, said, “I used to love socializing in the dining hall but since we have the dividers it’s hard to communicate and I dislike it.”

It’s understandable that it’s a solution to making sure everyone distances but there’s the feeling that not everything was taken into consideration as to what it would do to students.

According to Associate Head of Upper School Sara. Thorn, who is in charge of scheduling, having the lunches split undermined the community because not everyone has the same lunch. 

” We use lunch for community time. When everybody at the school was free, we would all be able to be together and have things like executive committee. We’re very aware that we were splitting that up and really didn’t want to but we really had to make the change to get fewer people in the dining hall at the same time.”

–  Associate Head of Upper School, Sara Thorn

Thorn said, “We use lunch for community time. When everybody at the school was free, we would all be able to be together and have things like Executive Committee. We’re very aware that we were splitting that up and really didn’t want to but we really had to make the change to get fewer people in the dining hall at the same time.” 

Thorn indicated that the old schedule may be brought back if Omicron phases out.

Thorn said, “We’ll have to see how it goes. We were asked to do this by the health advisory team so we’ll have to see and reassess. We don’t make major decisions without consulting other groups of adults on campus.”

The split lunch schedule was decided not by grade, but by the department. She said, “ We couldn’t split by grade level because so many of our classes have mixed grade levels, so [we] tried to do it by the department. It’ll take a little getting used to but it’s something that we really needed to do and we didn’t do it lightly.” 

Mr. Newcomb affirmed this by saying, “Ideally the lunches would be by grade but some classes have multiple grades in one class, so it simply would not work.” Mr. Newcomb and Mrs. Thorn have similar opinions on the matter. Along with this Mr. Newcomb further explained why the health advisory team decided to split the lunches by saying, “What the health advisory team shared with us, was the goal of identifying the lunchroom and in order to do that safely we had to split the lunches so that roughly half the students were eating at the same time.” 

Another reason for this split was that the lunches were the biggest safety concern when the advisory team talked about making the school safer. Mr. Newcomb said, “ Prior to coming over winter break, the focus was how do we make the school as safe as possible and the lunchtime is the highest risk moment of the school day because our masks are down.” 

There’s also the change of Morning Meeting time which Mr. Newcomb addressed by stating, “We just had to tweak a lot of the schedule, so that’s why morning meeting is now in the afternoon because otherwise other people would be eating at 1:30 during second lunch.”

Thanks to the help of Mr. Newcomb and Mrs. Thorn the community can have a better understanding of why the schedule was fixed to what it is now. We get a look at what decisions were made and why they were made.

As well as the help of students we have a little more understanding as to how they felt about the changes to the lunches and to the socializing aspect.