After a long spring vacation, Holyoke High students encountered a change in the school upon their arrival back Monday morning. That change was that the cafeteria is no longer serving breakfast from 7:30 to 8 a.m. Instead, breakfast is being delivered into the homerooms. The “breakfast in the classroom” was piloted at Holyoke High’s Dean Campus from the very start of the 2018-2019 school year. Dean saw a huge increase in the number of students consuming a breakfast by moving it from before school in the cafeteria to during homeroom in their classrooms, so they decided to give it a shot on a larger scale at the North Campus. To compare, 8% of North Campus’s students were eating breakfast before breakfast in the classroom started, while 80% of the Dean Campus students were eating a breakfast through breakfast in the classroom.

The idea may sound weird at first: why even bother with your old routine of going to the cafeteria in the morning if they are not serving food? There are a variety of opinions about it. “I like it because some students don’t have the opportunity to come early enough to eat. Because breakfast now is in homeroom, more students are eating breakfast,” says 10th grader, Alondra Ayala.

As of right now, this initiative seems to be working out. Far more kids are eating breakfast than were before. However, there are students that haven’t adapted to this change yet. For example, I grew up my whole life going to school early in the morning. I would grab the food from the cafeteria and socialize with my friends at the table; now, it’s just talking without eating. It’s not like anything changed in the social aspect, it’s just the routine.

For future generations of students, it will be easier to adapt to this. As mentioned before, there are many positive aspects of this change. Students who aren’t able to arrive to school early will have a chance to eat. Also, you can get some extra food if it is available from other classmates that do not want certain items, and students don’t need to be waiting in lines to get the food. On the other hand, now the school has to have more staff involved in order to ensure all students are offered a breakfast, receive the proper items, and are marked as having eaten or not. There are also no hot breakfast items offered throughout the pilot time at the North Campus, which has upset some students. Outside of that, it seems that breakfast during homeroom is here to stay.