Lunch at Skyline is 35 minutes long, which is about the same time as most other schools in the Granite School District. Before each quarter ends, Skyline has two intervention days, which have an hour-long lunch with the goal of giving students time to talk to their teachers about their grades before the quarter ends.
With how helpful this time is, a lot of Skyline students have expressed an interest in having intervention time every day, which would give time for students to talk to teachers and for the students that go off-campus to grab lunch to get back on time for class. Olympus High School already does a version of this with two lunches and a “flex time” for students. Essentially this means that all students have an hour-long lunch, and they have an opportunity to talk to their teachers about their grades any day of the week. To make sure that their students have a lot of time to get back to class on time if they go off-campus to eat.
Currently intervention time at Skyline requires that six minutes be subtracted from each class time in order to allow an hour-long lunch break. A lot of students argue that a 24 minute period during lunch to talk to their teachers is more valuable than six extra minutes in each class. A Skyline student, who would like to remain anonymous, said, “I usually don’t use the intervention time. I just go out to eat with my friends. But I do talk to my teachers during lunch a lot, and I wish there was more time to talk during lunch.”
Even if students don’t use the entirety of the intervention time to talk to their teachers, there are a lot of benefits to a longer lunch by itself. For example, if lunch time is longer, it gives students more time to relax during the school day, which can help prevent students from getting tired in the later periods. Another benefit that a longer lunch time would give is it would give students more time to study, if they have a test or review material, while it is still fresh in their mind.
Lunch is essential for students to be able to do well at school, but an extended lunch can give students even more time to get help or rest, which would help these students to continue to do well in school.
