Aiden McConkey

An infographic I designed to help summarize some of the key bullet points of this article. It does not go into full detail, so please scroll to read the full article!

As we all know, the current school lunch system involves splitting up eSTEM and ERHS students, and overall splitting up people by the building of one of their classes. As someone who wants things to benefit as many people as possible, I have proposed a system I call the “underclassmen-upperclassmen format”.

What is the “underclassmen-upperclassmen format” and how does it work?

This format would redesign the school lunch system to keep upperclassmen (11th and 12th graders) and underclassmen (9th and 10th graders) in separate lunches. Whether upperclassmen or underclassmen get first or second lunch is up to the administrators to decide, but overall, it would help reduce bullying and harassment and keep students with their peers more often.

What are the benefits of this system, and when could it be implemented?

Most friend groups are composed of students from the same class, so splitting the students up my way could have most get their way. After all, there are way more students who have classmates as their peers than those who have upperclassmen or underclassmen as their friends. It is unfortunate for many, including myself and many I know, to have friends who do not have any classes with me. If I am not able to see them at lunch either, my friendship with that person will slowly start to wither away. This system will help students retain friendship bonds with students in other classes, especially eSTEM students. If the administrators at ERHS seriously consider implementing this format, realistically, students could see the format at the start of the 2026-2027 school year.

There is also no need to worry about the lunches being more crowded, because this format just rearranges students. There is still the same number of students in the school!

How eSTEM may complicate matters, and how it could be resolved

eSTEM students typically only have first lunch, due to their classes largely being in the eSTEM building. It would be nice if eSTEM could follow suit with ERHS in splitting the students by class into separate lunches, but if this fails, there is a solution.

I thought of a more complex format that would overall help keep friends in touch. In this scenario, since eSTEM must only have one lunch, eSTEM would rotate between first and second lunch by semester. This could mean that some of the students with a separate lunch could still get to meet their eSTEM friends. The format isn’t pretty, but this would only be implemented if the underclassmen-upperclassmen eSTEM format is not compatible.

What the students say

When asked about how the current school lunch deals with friend groups, ERHS junior Roey Lin commented, “The current school lunch often splits up my friend group in half, and I do not see them a lot of the time.”

ERHS freshman and fellow journalist, Kingsley Gao, when asked about whether or not he would want this new lunch format, said, “Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. It wouldn’t make lunches more crowded, since all it does is split the students in half another way.”

Please share this with friends and peers!

With enough people seeing this, students at ERHS could actually propose this new school lunch format to the administrators. It seems like a good idea on paper, so why not try it out?