Briana's+Position+Paper

__Senior Privileges: Lunches Position Paper__

In my school's Senior Seminar: Living Democracy class, groups have been divided up and set out to tackle one of the ever-growing number of issues surrounding our world, our country, or our community. While these groups' choices range in various directions and scopes, the group that I am in chose a topic closer to home. Senior privileges is an issue that is members debated within any school system. Usually, the set-up is teachers or faculty members against students. Regardless of the scenario, this was the broad topic our group focused on. To narrow our topic down to something central we could focus on, someone in our group had a great idea about our school lunches. She had found that in other schools in the country, students with cars, seniors, were allowed to leave school grounds during their lunch period and get lunch outside of the campus. An open campus idea sounded like a great one and after doing some research, we realized that this could actually be something that could be put into place at our own school. Of course, our 22-30 minute 4-lunch periods would have to be cut down to more equally-timed, 3-lunches. The issue of not allowing seniors to leave during lunches seemed to us as a matter of safety versus giving students more freedom. The negative effects of having this policy in place is that the school system claims to be gearing their seniors up towards life in the 'real world'. But by not allowing students to leave during school hours, how does this prepare them for the workplace where on their 30-minute breaks, they can go wherever they please? How does confiding them for every lunch teach them about responsibility or managing their time wisely? These are the questions that we, as a group, began asking ourselves as we dove into this project. Since our school has been built, seniors were never allowed to leave the campus during lunches. In fact, other than internship periods, students with cars were never allowed to leave campus during school hours. This was just one of the questions my group asked our school's principal, Mr. Gerald Foley and other assistant principals and administrators. The reaction was often the same. As long as this school has been running, never has a group of students ever tried to change this privilege. This meant that we were the first. Although Mr. Foley admitted that a few complaints had been raised about the lack of senior privileges overall, no one had ever tried to put a new one into a effect or take any action at all. When thinking about what groups of people would be effected by this new change if the policy were to be changed, we looked first within the school. First, of course, are the seniors and students themselves, as well as teachers and faculty. Turning then to the community as a whole, parents, law-enforcement, community members and businesses would also be affected. As we considered this, we began to think more seriously about the steps it would take to get this program moving and off the paper, into the real world. There are two major viewpoints that we encountered as we interviewed various officials within our school about our project and what we were trying to accomplish. It seemed that the administrators were either 'for' our project or 'against' it. One of our avid supporters seemed to be our principal himself. From an interview conducted by three members of our group, the findings were that although he recognized that some concerns would be raised by this project, it was a symbol of change. An idea that he seemed to welcome within his school system. Also, the idea of the responsibility and time management skills that would be gained from this experience and indulgence would greatly help us cope with life in the real world, he agreed. On the opposite side, one of our assistant principals seemed very against the idea of seniors being allowed to leave during lunches. Another three students from our group interviewed this assistant principal and our findings were much different than those who interviewed Foley. Safety seemed the biggest concern on the 'against' side. Even if students had parent permission to leave school grounds during lunch hours, the school would still be responsible for the child. Also, the general feeling was that changing the policy simply wasn't necessary. One assistant principal said something along the lines of, we provide the students of this school with good food, friendship, a good amount of time to themselves. Why change? What more do they need? For my own personal viewpoint on this subject, I have to take the 'for' side. My group is working towards broadening senior privileges so that new responsibilities and managing skills will be placed upon us before we enter the workplace where these skills will be needed. Even in college, so much free time is given to students, they need to set a foundation for managing their time and keeping appointments early on. In order to work this project and help it go somewhere, my group is focusing on changing this rule to allow senior with cars to leave during lunches. In order to do this, the lunch schedule will have to be changed back to a 3-lunch schedule, which one of our interviewee's pointed out was how the lunches were set up before our school was re-built into the model it is now. Allowing seniors to leave would create less chaos in the lunch rooms as well as give seniors a greater sense of freedom and teach time restrictions. In conclusion, our group will continue to work on moving forward with our plan to change the privileges offered to seniors, specifically allowing those seniors with cars to leave during lunch and eat lunch in the town. This will often be the way lunch and free times are spent in college so why not prepare students now by giving then this freedom? Making it an only-senior privilege only makes sense: seniors dominate the parking lots and seniors only have on year left. Even our activities director agrees that seniors should have more privileges in our school other than being allowed parking spots, which the juniors also have, and being allowed to sit outside or one a bench in the spine during lunches. Seniors are one-step away from freedom-filled college. Shouldn't the school be giving them more of a taste of this freedom than allowing them to sit on a wooden bench in the main hallway of our school?