The administrators at Heritage Middle School approached their cafeteria set up with the same considerations school leaders everywhere faced: How do you create communal spaces for students to eat and socialize while taking into account health and social distancing guidelines?
What they’ve reimagined this year abides by safety guidelines while ensuring that students could face one another to connect over lunch. For students, it was an adjustment from the familiar long lunch tables of last year.
“At first I thought it was crazy, weird-looking,” eighth-grader Miguel Bedolla said. “Now, it’s not that bad. I feel like I’m more connected with my friends. We could talk to each other more often and we can be closer together.”
Eighty classroom desks are lined up in rows, separated by more than six feet apart in the school’s commons area. Rows have been paired up to face each other, with one row of desks fixed with plastic partitions. The main aisle splits the lunchroom with arrows taped in the middle, indicating the route students need to follow when entering and exiting the space.
Students had a couple of days to settle into the space, choosing where they wanted to sit with their friends. Once they declared their seats, school staff and administrators placed stickers on desks to identify where students sat during lunch periods and whether they were in Cohort A or B. This makes it easy for school leaders to identify students in case they need to conduct contact tracing measures.
Principal Dru Tomlin said he and his leadership team wanted to create a space that was developmentally-responsive to their students while making sure they felt safe.
“We didn’t want to do it in a rigid way that seemed harsh,” he said. “It had to be a human endeavor. We had to put the person before the program.”
Tomlin said students adapted quickly to the new procedures in the lunchroom, crediting the informational videos the school created for students at the start of Blended Learning that outlined expectations in the lunchroom and hallways.
This week, eighth-grader Kaleese Hisle took her usual seat in the lunchroom, waiting for her friends to arrive. While she sees her friends in passing in the hallway, lunches and recess serve as the main way to connect with them during the school day.
“It would be cooler to (sit) closer to my friends but at the same time, it’s safety precautions,” she said.