Lunch duty has long been a thorn in the side of Upper School students; nothing takes away from the relaxation of lunch time more than having to walk around the dining hall to clean up leftover messes while watching everyone else eats their lunch and socializes.  While ensuring that the lunch room is clean and the staff are treated respectfully is important and necessary, the current system of lunch duty at Hackley is often inefficient.  Students are left to walk around almost aimlessly for the majority of the lunch period, and have little interest in being forced to pick up after their peers.  So long as the lunch room is dirty after meals, Hackley should retain lunch duty to keep our lunchroom clean, but should revamp the system to make it more efficient by making it shorter and more organized.  

The purpose of lunch duty is to ensure that students clean up after themselves and treat the dining hall and dining staff with respect. Those who are on lunch duty are supposed to remind the students while they eat that they should make sure to leave the tables the way they found them — spotless. Often, the students do not do as requested and those who are on lunch duty must clean up after those who did not.

Christopher Arnold, Hackley’s Dean of Student Life, organizes lunch duty, assigning each student to serve for twenty-five minutes during a free. Seniors serve their lunch duty throughout the first trimester in order to set an example for the underclassmen. As the school year goes on, each grade must endure this chore.

Mr. Arnold believes that “[lunch duty] is effective in that it ameliorates the mess left in the dining hall. I think that in the ideal we would not have lunch duty, but unfortunately, the number of students who don’t bother to bring their dishes up to the window remains pretty high. Until students recognize that this is unacceptably inconsiderate we will keep lunch duty.”  It is clear that lunch duty is necessary, at least right now, to help keep the lunchroom clean — students just aren’t doing it on their own.

While we agree that the lunchroom should be kept clean and treated respectfully, lunch duty is not nearly as effective and efficient as the administration believes in accomplishing this task.  Each lunch duty period lasts one lunch period, or half an hour. How many plates could there be to pick up during first fifteen to twenty minutes of each period?  Before there are plates left to be picked up, students actually have to eat.  There is little point in having lunch duty before students even make a mess.  Having students wander around the lunchroom for twenty minutes before there is even a mess to be cleaned up is a waste of time.  The school should strive to create a more efficient system.  

One way Hackley could do so would be to emulate the system of lunch duty at the Riverdale Country School.  At Riverdale, during the last fifteen minutes of lunch, each advisor group is assigned to lunch duty once a month. Students go around their dining hall and ask their peers to clean up. They also have spray bottles and rags if there are still messes left on the table.

“The expectation is that students clean up after themselves but distractions such as their friends get in the way leading to a leftover cup or napkin that someone forgot to pick up,” said Brian Carver, Riverdale’s Dean of Students Class of 2016. Carver believes that lunch duty is an effective way for students to take ownership and responsibility. “Students have started to think while they are eating lunch about how when they were on lunch duty, they appreciated when their peers cleaned up. This thought leads to more students cleaning as a courtesy to their classmates,” said Carver.

Riverdale has already begun to improve its system with the help of its computer science class, which is making an app to make lunch duty more efficient. This app would enable students to sign in with their student IDs as opposed, to charting everything on paper, which is far less organized. Riverdale is clearly making an effort to improve their lunch duty system, leading to more organization and order.  Hackley should do the same.