Take back our kid's lunch time

I want to start off by saying we love all of our teachers and faculty at Homewood schools. We understand they are under pressure from government regarding test scores and school funding.

Many parents have noticed that our children do not have enough time to eat their lunch. At Churchill for instance they have to find their lunch in a bin, get in a hand sanitizing line and/or wait in a hot lunch line before they even take a bite, meanwhile the 20 minute lunch clock is ticking. Some kids toward the back of the hot lunch line have to use their recess time to finish their lunch. Willow school is much of the same.

Our main objective here is to add 10 minutes to our kid's lunch time, while maintaining the 20 minute recess time. When some of us were kids (40 and older parents) we had 30 minutes of lunch and 30 minutes of recess, now the standard is 20 minutes each. THERE ARE NO LAWS OR REGULATIONS REGARDING THE LENGTH OF OUR KIDS LUNCH. They could make it 10 minutes if they wanted! Adults that are full time employees are guaranteed a 30 minute lunch under Illinois law. Why do our children not have that same protection?? Parents should have a voice on this matter since it is such an important topic. Having a healthy unrushed lunch and expelling social energy leads to a more productive school day for children. There is a plethora of research that supports this. (but c’mon do we really need research to tell us this). Kids have a very rigorous school day so lets give them a proper break to eat, and decompress.

Now lets do some math: Churchill students have eight subject periods per day. In order to get the ten minutes back for lunch you have to shorten each period by a whopping 75 seconds. That’s right, our schools have taken ten minutes from our kids lunch to only gain 75 seconds per subject! Schools are only mandated by Illinois law to have a minimum of 5 hours of instruction time per day. District 153 currently reports 6 hours so they can bank the extra time to allow for 13 half days that they use for school improvement. They only need to bank 17 extra minutes per day to accomplish this so there is plenty of room to adjust the schedule. Lets change this now and sign this petition and meet us at the next board meeting to make sure it gets done. It’s important for dads to come too!

Remember, the government works for us not the other way around! Especially when it comes to our children!

In addition to getting 10 more minutes back for lunch, here are some other possible solutions:

A) Instead of waiting in a hand sanitizing line, let the kids wash their hands with soap and water in class before the bell rings.

B) Let the kids keep their lunch in their cubbies so they can have their lunch in hand when the bell rings.

C) Have recess before lunch. Western Trails School in Carol Stream did this and the kids exhaust all of their social energy first in recess then come in and wolf down their lunch.