COVID-19 has and will continue to change almost every facet of the way we learn and interact. The cafeteria will be one of these places, which is primarily affected by the new COVID guidelines.

With the way we eat lunch in a COVID era of schooling being changed, students will have to adapt to a new way of interacting six feet apart. Students will no longer be sitting at tables as they are used to.

Instead, they will be switching to a desk model, meaning each student will have an desk, six feet apart from each other. The district has put a lot of work into making sure the desks are safe for students. One of these measures is making assigned desks common throughout the building.

“For contact tracing purposes, students are going to have assigned seats in every space in the building.” The cafeteria is an extension of that, but they’ll have an assigned seat on the bus, an assigned seat in every class, and an assigned seat in the cafeteria,” Assistant Principal Karon Wallace said.

With many students already beginning in-person learning in the surrounding school districts, the administration got some inspiration from these schools.

“Mr. (Evans) Branigan (III) and I went to Ben Davis, and then I went to Warren Central because they have kids right now, and we looked at their cafeteria setup and their school set up to kind of get a better understanding of what we might do,” Wallace said.

School will change drastically in the coming weeks and months and as norms are shattered, the way we eat lunch will be part of these adjustments. If students are resilient and adaptive through this process, the new protocols should be par for the course.