Fighting for your life: that’s what it feels like to get on the elevator after lunch. With the way North Atlanta’s lunch schedule is set up, the lunch shifts are released by floor. Our lunch period is short enough as it is, but because of the elevator chaos, students leave lunch early to ensure they can get back to class on time. Imagine you have class on the tenth floor and your 20-minute lunch is coming to an end. You rush to the elevators (of course no one wants to walk up that many stairs) and you press 10 to find out what elevator you should go to.

You get B. So does everyone else because the floors are so close to each other. A crowd forms around the elevator. When the doors finally open, the group of students rushes on. On one side you are crushed against the back wall, and on the other, you are pressed against someone’s backpack. It’s not fun. Hey, at least you made it on and, you won’t be late for class. I believe that this mayhem would go away if the lunch schedule changed, and maybe while we’re at it, let’s make our lunches a little longer.

The number of students who return to their third-period class late, blaming the elevators, demonstrates how this problem is also affecting our learning. If you don’t make it onto that first elevator, who knows how long it’s going to take for the next one to arrive. I have gone through this situation myself. Continuously checking my phone and watching the minutes tick by, I wonder if I should just surrender and take the stairs. Those few minutes of class missed after lunch could be significant. “Once I missed the beginning of a quiz because I couldn’t get on an elevator. I was so mad,” said junior Elise Walker.

I believe that if we changed the lunch schedule, everyone would benefit. Students would get longer lunches and teachers would not have late students. One idea I have would be to let out students by grade rather than by floor. This would mean that each lunch period is thirty minutes long. The elevators would not direct all students to the same letter elevator, as the floors would be more dispersed. Another solution is to continue to dismiss by floor, but not the floors that are next to each other. For example, one lunch could be the eleventh floor and the fifth floor. This would also allow students to get on the elevators more efficiently. Again, the elevators would not direct all students to the same elevator, and there would be less of a crowd. If North Atlanta tries out one of these methods, I think that our lunch experience would be much calmer, and arriving to third period on time would be much easier.