The cafeteria needs to be renovated for various reasons, including some students disliking the food options. One of the best ways to fix this problem without getting rid of free lunches is having a food court style extension to the cafeteria with fast food restaurants.
This would help improve the environment of the school because students could eat better food, and better food would get students to look forward to eating lunch.
Some schools have already implemented fast food restaurants to their cafeteria,
However, RCHS is part of the National School Lunch Program and the National Breakfast Program, which regulates outside vendors by limiting the amount of sodium, fats, and sugar in foods they serve.
This would severely limit the amount of foods that these restaurants would be able to produce within the school and may cause problems in implementing this in RCHS.
The most common restaurants that are in high school cafeterias are: Chick Fil A, Subway, Pizza Hut, Chipotle, and other franchises/non-franchised restaurants.
Another benefit for expanding the cafeteria is that an expansion would give more room for senior handprints, which is a tradition the school started doing during the 2022-23 school year; an expansion in the cafeteria will help prolong this tradition.
Another benefit for expanding the cafeteria is that it would give room for more tables.
Although the three lunch schedules is enough for people to find a seat in the cafeteria, there are days when the school implements a two lunch schedule and many have trouble finding tables and sitting with their friends. An expansion to the cafeteria would help prevent this and make the cafeteria better for students who may not have enough room at their table for all of their friends to sit down.
Another benefit for expanding the cafeteria would be that students would eat more healthy than the alternative free lunch. This would be the case because the restaurants would have to abide by the restrictions placed by the National School Lunch Program and the National Breakfast program.
Students, Teachers and other staff would all benefit from an expanding, food-court style cafeteria because there would be a wider range of more healthy foods that everyone in the school would be able to eat.
