Photo Credit: Fuey Saechao
Student reaches down to grab chips she paid for through the gate.
December 8, 2010
Juan Ramos & Jazmin Garcia, Media Academy
“It’s a waste of my time that I could have been eating,” said Coronel, a sophomore at Mandela Academy.
The wait for food in the cafeteria at the Fremont Federation of High Schools has gone down now that the school has added seven more food lines, but hundreds of students like Coronel still are unhappy that they have to go there in the first place.
The school board voted to close Fremont at lunch over the summer. Students learned of the change only after they returned to school.
Open lunch was closed at McClymonds last spring and at Castlemont last November.
“Closed-campus lunch sucks because it’s treating us like prisoners and the wait for lunch is longer,” said Leiana Pahulu, a senior at College Preparatory & Architecture Academy.
With Fremont students no longer given the option to go off campus during lunch, the number of students who turn to the cafeteria at noontime has climbed from 250 per day last year to 430 this year.
This delights cafeteria manager Lawana Wyatt, who says that while there have been challenges in serving more students, the extra lines for food this year seem to be working “pretty good.”
Health Educator Katie Riemer worries about skipped lunches, but thinks closed campus may improve student nutrition long term because it is easier to control what is eaten on campus than off campus.
Riemer runs the teen Wellness Committee that has been working on improving school lunch. Committee ideas include getting the cafeteria to buy more organic food from local markets; having a health fair with taste tests; putting attractive posters in the cafeteria; and planning more activities for students during lunch.
In October, the committee hosted Jennifer LeBarre, the head of nutrition services for Oakland Unified School District, to talk about the changes and to explain how the lunch program works. They also dined on a vegetarian meal made by student members of the “Soul Kitchen” program.
LeBarre told 35 students, teachers, health care workers and community members that she had put an end to “plastic cheese” and chili cheese fries. Cafeterias now serve shredded cheese instead.
LeBarre was surprised to learn during the meeting that Fremont served fries every day at lunch. She explained that this could not continue to happen. Such change must be made, said LeBarre, “because it’s the right thing to do.”
Students do not agree.
“That’s just horrible,” says Tierra Penny, a student at College Preparatory & Architecture Academy. “Fries are the only thing I look forward to.”
Many Fremont students envy students at Oakland High and Oakland Tech, the two comprehensive schools that still have open campus lunch.
Yet at OHigh, students are frustrated that a four-year remodeling project, including new classrooms and computer labs that opened this fall, hasn’t improved long lunch lines.
“We have a new building,” wrote student Steven Phan, in an opinion piece entitled “Lunch is Junk,” for OHigh’s newspaper, the Aegis. “We could use a new cafeteria.”
Read Phan’s full piece at www.oaktownteentimes.org.
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