Current Events > in high school, were you guys confined to a cafeteria and couldn't leave?

(+) Yeah! (+)

That's the impression I get from watching tv shows and movies. (I'm not talking about the issue of being allowed to leave campus to get food outside, but being allowed in other parts of the school outside of the cafeteria)

Lunch period for us was entirely outdoors. Here's my school cafeteria in red highlight:


kinda hard to tell but it's open air. the second floor of that building is just covering it. there are tables there but nowhere near enough for everyone. most people just hung around the quad area and the courts. people played basketball, etc. you could go anywhere in the blue areas. i was mostly in the grassy mound in the center, which also has a couple of benches

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We were allowed in or out until something bad happened to one of the kids outside of school grounds, then they were real strict about it for a while until they stopped paying attention again.

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We were allowed anywhere in the school. And you could leave the school too.

Actually, in Winter if you didn't have the full uniform on, you couldn't get INTO the cafeteria.

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When I first started high school, the campuses were open at lunch-- meaning people could drive over to fast food places and come back. Unfortunately, there was a shooting at a Wendy's that killed something like 5 people including one (maybe 2?) high schoolers during lunch and so the policy was changed.

But my school did not have nearly enough room for everyone to eat in the cafeteria, so they opened up a second room & a ton of people would just eat hanging out in the halls or outside when the weather was nice.

Yeah. When lunchtime happened you had to be there by a certain time and leave all at the same time. You weren't allowed to leave the premise without an excuse and being caught resulted in detention. It got worse if you went outside school grounds to go to Chick-fil-A.

There was a designated area but it was in a sort of place where it has a roof but it's also still outside because all it has is a roof and 2 walls and the other sides are completely open, I dunno what you call that. It wasn't unallowed to leave but someone would get on your case if you were eating somewhere weird.

Let me hang by this wall ffs, it's out of the way so I dunno how someone keeps randomly finding me.

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Nope. I don't think I ever actually ate lunch in the cafeteria. We were free to go wherever we wanted on campus. But it was a small magnet school, so I can't say if that was representative of High Schools in general.

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pre-covid some kids would eat in the computer room next to my office room but most of them were confined to specific areas like cafeteria, outside on the campus, library and some areas that weren't classrooms that some staff might open for activites like a book club

No

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Yes, we couldn't leave the cafeteria. Get food, sit at a table, eat, bell rings, go back to classes.

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yea, we could go almost anywhere on campus.

seniors could also leave campus during lunch, but you had to set up some kinda agreement beforehand, iirc.

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we could go anywhere during lunch as long as we were back for class. yes, this includes leaving the school area entirely

though there was one nearby restaurant that students from my school kept causing problems / creating messes at and eventually all students were banned from going there during lunch hour. so I guess technically we couldn't go anywhere but it was pretty close

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we had a small lunch room, so of course most people couldn't eat there. We didn't have an open campus lunch.

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yes. i was told by a few people that before my first year in highschool the principle let students eat outside, but my first year there was the same year a new principle came in and he hated fun. he blocked outdoor lunches because of the "increased rate of students walking off campus", he used that argument to build a big fence with actual barbed wire around portions of the school...

the lunchroom itself wasn't bad though. building was built like a big box, the interior space was reserved for the lunchroom and the library. so the ceiling was 4 stories up with skylights, needless to say the foodfights were epic.

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Nope. You weren't allowed to leave campus though.

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We had a good sized area of the campus we were allowed to be in, but it was easy to go anywhere in campus.

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At my high school we were free to go anywhere in/out of the school during our lunch period.

The most unrealistic thing to me about high school movies and shows is all the time the characters have in between class periods lol

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Kinda, you could move around in the halls only if you were on your way to/from the cafeterias. There were cafeterias on both the first and second floor and four lunch "periods", A through D. All of your classes and lunch times were scheduled in such a way to make sure that the cafeterias weren't overwhelmed. I'm pretty sure it was grouped together by department, but I don't remember.

Couldn't go outside though. Ever, unless you had a pass or were with staff. I bet they'd have put chains on the doors if it weren't flagrantly illegal lol

I usually ate at a friend's house. We had an open campus.

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Yeah. Unless you were a senior, then you were allowed to leave

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We had open campus up until the year after I left.

Get fucked, everybody else

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