9:50am.
Yup, you read that right, according to an article on Parent Central, some schools in Toronto's Peel region have their kids eating "lunch" at 9:50am.
Crazy, right?
Not just crazy, I'd argue nutritionally irresponsible and were there such a thing, nutritionally criminal.
Why?
Feed kids "lunch" at 9:50am with the expectation that they might have time to snack somewhere later in the day but with no plan for a real meal until dinner and you'll accomplish a whole bunch of horrible stuff. The kids' attention spans will be shot so their learning will be impaired, they're going to be starving at some point so their dietary choices are going to be impacted and their hunger is going to fuel huge dinner portions and heighten their risk of childhood obesity.
The rationale?
Apparently it's because of overcrowding in the lunchroom and instead of buying some portables or allowing lunch to be consumed in classrooms the Peel District School board has decided it'd be preferable to hamstring their students' educations and increase their students' risk of developing childhood obesity.
Great plan there Peel. Way to think through a problem.
[Hat tip to my friend Brad from the Canadian Obesity Network who commented to me regarding his 6 year old, "If Jack ate lunch at 10:00 he would kill another child to eat him, by, say, 2:00"]
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Hi Yoni. I don't know if this is the case in the Peel region, but at schools in the Upper Canada School Board, rather than a lunch break with a morning and an afternoon recess, there are two nutrition breaks (at 11 AM and 1 PM) with 20 minutes to eat followed by 20 minutes to play outside.The board felt this optimized learning time as well and better met kids' nutritional needs.
ReplyDeleteHi Anonymous (why so shy?),
ReplyDeleteThe Upper Canada School Board plan sounds fabulous to me. Allowing the kids to both play and eat every 2-3 hours would certainly help manage hunger/cravings and likely improve attention too.
From my read on Peel, that's definitely not what's going on over there.
Something very similar to this happened at my high school. The first lunch period started at 10:15 a.m., which isn't quite as bad as this but still pretty ridiculous. It was partly because of crowding, but also because our school day started at 7:10 a.m., which is too early for teenager, IMO.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to measure test scores/performance for those eating at 9:50.
ReplyDeleteI'm a big fan of the "nutrition break" idea - good on Upper Canada.
Those at Peel who approved this should be made to do the same thing to see what it's like.
Mark McGill, RD
Ottawa
I think a handy rule of thumb for a principal to follow would be:
ReplyDelete"If I couldn't get away with what I'm doing if I were running a jail, I shouldn't try it in my school."
My sophomore year in high school, I had 4th period lunch at 10:15 or so. Then I would come home around 2:15-2:30 and be so hungry I'd eat practically a whole other lunch. I don't remember this but my mom said I gained a bunch of weight that year!
ReplyDeleteMy junior high had something similar. The issue wasn't crowding -- it was bus scheduling. This was in the winter of 1973-1974, when we had Daylight Savings Time in the middle of winter, and to make sure elementary schoolers weren't being bused in the dark, the Junior High's hours were changed to 7:35-13:55, with the nominal lunch periods starting at about 10AM EDT.
ReplyDeleteHigh School hours were 7:55-13:55, with the nominal lunch periods running from about 10:45 to about 13:10. If your class hours were such that you could not have your free/lunch period within that timeframe, you had a "free" period rather than a "lunch" period. Food service was closed, so if you did not transport your own meal, you were relegated to the coffee, artificial fruit-flavored punch, and fake-granola-bar vending machines, and/or any sort of candy you could purchase from the sport teams' and activity groups' fundraisers.