Juniors can now leave the school premises during STEP, along with seniors, to get lunch due to the new lunch policy.

This year, juniors can go off campus during STEP. Before, only seniors would be allowed to go out during STEP. This was implemented to treat upperclassmen like older students. This will be a permanent change. The new IDs are not tied into this change.

Principal Vilma Najera said, “We thought that it would be nice to allow juniors and seniors out to open lunch.”

Opinions on the new lunch policies are mixed. “I think it’s a good opportunity for almost everyone, but if [juniors] are going to start taking [negative] advantages of it, then it’s not good,” said junior Jennifer Castillo, “but I think it’s fair for the juniors…to have open lunch.”

Senior Priscilla Aboabea-Saakodee said, “I feel like it’s kind of unfair that they let juniors go out during lunch because when I was a junior, it had already been enforced onto the rest of the us juniors that we were not allowed to go out during lunch even if we were going to go with a senior. It just feels like administration are giving more priorities to the underclassmen…I feel as though they could’ve made freshman, sophomore, and juniors have closed lunch so that it would give more priority to the seniors since [as juniors we used to have closed lunch].”

Students who take advantage of open lunch will have to return to school before lunch ends.