Changes to academic lunch were put in place Monday that eliminate the option of a teacher being able to cancel an academic lunch once it has been assigned to a student, regardless of the status of the student’s work. 

“We have been allowing teachers to cancel lunch detentions when a student turns the work in prior to them having to sit in academic lunch, but that’s not going to be a thing anymore,” associate principal Stacy Whaling said. “So if a student gets a referral, they will have to stay in academic lunch.” 

The modification is designed to simplify the processes for teachers and students alike. 

“There’s a lot of logistical factors that were difficult in regards to the cancellation,” Whaling said. “You’ve got the teacher side of things, the student side of things, you have the teacher who’s working the academic lunch who really doesn’t know what exactly the student did or didn’t turn in, so it’s just getting very complicated, so this will help it run more smoothly.”

Some students, however, don’t see the point once a grade is improved.

“If the grade is up then there shouldn’t be a point to it,” sophomore Priyansh Sharma said. “I think that should be unnecessary and a waste of resources and time in my opinion. I think that it will stress them out even more because it will really lower their self esteem because I did bring my grade up yet they still assign it to me. Instead they should be cancelled because he’s doing better.”

For English teacher Nicole Paterson, the change is a way to prevent students from cheating the system.

“I think that’s a necessary change,” English teacher Nicole Paterson said. “The purpose of academic lunch was to provide a mechanism to hold students accountable for academic behaviors without penalizing their academic grade. If we allow teachers to cancel the academic lunch, then students can kind of game the system, and essentially end up with a couple extra days to complete an assignment without ever having a consequence.”