With the thought of students not turning in assignments on time more of a behavioral issue than one of understanding the material, teachers can now assign students an academic lunch in the lecture hall where students will have another opportunity to complete their work.

“Academic lunch is a new process that we started this year to address the completion of work that is valuable for the student learning process,” assistant principal Fern Bamfo-Addo said. “Sometimes students miss work due to absences, not getting to complete their work or sometimes students choose to opt out of work so that process is put into address those behaviors.”

Even though this program is meant to help students, some students may choose not to attend academic lunch when they are assigned, leading to the possibility of more consequences.

“There are various consequences for opting out if you choose not to attend academic lunch,” “The first offense gets a warning, the second offense will result in a lunch detention, the third offense is a Thursday reflection or Saturday school, the fourth offense includes seeing your AP and/or get some sort of consequence and the fifth offenses includes ISS. The academic lunch will be held Tuesday through Friday, and students will work during their assigned lunch and that will be held in the lecture hall.”

Math teacher Amber Bennett thinks academic lunch can potentially be a good for students.

“I like the idea of it,” Bennett said. “It’s one way for kids to potentially just be made to get work done and what not, they can multitask while eating. It’s a short period of time so they can’t really get too much done but I mean it’s a good way built in the school day to take care of business that should’ve been taken care of on their own time.”

Sophomore Nour Bitar doesn’t see academic lunch as helpful to all students.

“Overall it can be helpful to certain students,” Bitar said. “But I do think that we’re in high school and we should be able to get our work done on time without having teachers hunting us down and assigning us academic lunch.”