Attempting to start second semester strong, Dr. AJ Muttillo, Leesville’s principal, is advocating for an increase in participation during SMART Lunch. To continuously track participation, Muttillo is encouraging teachers to enforce the use of sign-ins in order to determine whether or not students are using SMART Lunch to their advantage.
One group that is enforcing the use of sign-ins are the librarians, who recognize many positive changes resulting from the new lunch system, including a better work ethic.
“When students are compelled to sign in, they take it much more seriously. The intention when you come into the library is to do academic work. If you take the time to sign in, you’re probably gonna come in here and do academic work and so we’ve definitely noticed the focus shift more to that,” said Erica Knightstep, a librarian at LRHS.
The sign-in process is simple, to say the least. On the homepage of the LRHS website, a link to the SMART Lunch sign-in can be found. Here, the students have to record their name, teacher’s name, and their reasoning for attending SMART Lunch. This only takes up a minute of the students’ time.
The new sign-in process drives many students away who are paralyzed by their own laziness. The extra minute spent waiting in line and signing up is too much to bare, so some students just don’t bother.
What those students don’t realize, though, is that their decision to not sign-in will only negatively affect them further. With the extreme attention focused on the decision of whether or not to continue SMART Lunch, their recorded participation is impacting the final decision.
Signing in and logging your time spent at SMART Lunch is crucial, because if the given time is shown as not being beneficial to a student’s academic agenda, it could very well go away. The data collected is a good way for the administrators to check if SMART Lunch is used for its intended purposes.
And believe it or not, the purpose of the lengthy hour lunch is not so students can make it to their favorite restaurants and back or to supply an extra social hour. Rather, SMART Lunch, as you can guess by its name, is intended to be used as smart, academic time where students are given the opportunity to seek extra help and study time.
Students need to be mindful of their time spent during SMART Lunch in the near future. Simply visiting a teacher’s classroom or the media center productively, every so often, may finally take the edge off of the debate regarding the existence of SMART Lunch.
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