Dear Orange and Black Editorial Team,

I am writing to give my honest take on the “Lunch Incentive”. As most people are aware there has been a recent incentive introduced on freshmen as a way to reward them for showing up to school and getting good grades. If a student has a 2.75 GPA or higher and 90 percent attendance (and above) they may leave campus for lunch. At first I was excited for this new taste of freedom, leaving campus at lunch sounded amazing. Then I found out my attendance was 88 percent and I would not be able to leave. I assumed my attendance would be much higher as I have never skipped a class but apparently admin includes sick days as part of a student’s overall attendance which I find more than problematic. I have been pulled out of school quite a great deal as of late due to a diagnostic process that is taking longer than I thought. I was frustrated to say the least as I have no control over my needs and illnesses and that should not be included in my overall attendance. I thought I wouldn’t be able to leave campus but low and behold they made an exception for me because my GPA is a 4.0. What does this mean for kids with a 3.9 GPA and 88 percent attendance, well they can’t leave. Why should a student who is sick be punished? Now this is only the first problem I have noticed, the other being that the incentive makes very little sense as most freshmen (myself included) do not have our drivers license yet. I am only 15 therefore I cannot legally drive myself places. Due to this freshman students have 3 places (within walking distance) available to eat, Zoup, Mama Ree’s, and Dairy Queen. I decided to go and check out the lines at these establishments (a little investigative journalism if you will). I had hypothesized that due to the hundreds freshman students allowed to leave, that lines would be extremely long. I was proven to be extremely correct. The wait for most lines was around 20 minutes, this means that if you have a 45 minute lunch period and it takes you 20 minutes to walk there and back, and 20 minutes to order, you would have 5 minutes to eat. This is what happened to me. I got a sandwich and took it back with me to the school, I had 7 minutes to eat said sandwich which is not enough time. It’s been proven that the slower you eat the better it is for you as you have more time to digest your food. While this seems like a minor inconvenience I think that over time our admin will find that a lot of freshmen will be late for class, which is what they were trying to prevent with the requirements for the incentive. This makes the incentive an effort in futility. To conclude, I believe the idea of the incentive sounds nice, but the execution is lacking. That is not to say that it is a horrible idea, I just think it’s lacking proper execution.

-Lily Hoffman (GJHS freshman)