What’s for Lunch? Some Say Too Many Schoolkids

Bobby Day, a 15-year-old freshman at Serra High School, needed a place to sit down. He grabbed the bench behind him. The woman sitting on it almost fell to the floor. She yelled. Bobby looked surprised.

“Oops, I’m sorry,” he said, offering a deferential tip of his Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. And then he sat down anyway.

The woman sighed and scowled, then went back to her lunch and salad. “Kids,” she muttered to a pair of friends.

It was lunchtime at Round Table Pizza on Tierrasanta Boulevard, a block away from Serra High School, where every weekday the lunch crowd sets off at 11:33. They come marching in pairs, fours, fives, wielding Sony Walkmans and wearing black leather jackets bearing the names of heavy metal bands--even with the temperature at 98 degrees.

Hundreds of Dollars a Week

Their presence is an issue in the community. The Tierrasanta Community Council, along with many parents and neighborhood business operators, want Serra students confined to campus in a “closed” environment.

The students, and even their teachers and administrators, want the campus kept open, allowing passage from campus to area shops and restaurants, or to home, during the 42-minute daily lunch period.

Merchants, including the managers of a row of fast-food restaurants

where the students spend hundreds of dollars each week, say they prefer the closed concept. They would rather lose student business than continue to suffer the absence of an adult lunch crowd, which they say has virtually disappeared with the daily onslaught of visitors from Serra.

“It would be fine if they weren’t always trying to tear the place up,” said Ed Fischer, manager of a Carl’s Jr. on Tierrasanta Boulevard, who said that 50 to 60 students spend at least $2.50 apiece each day. “I want the closed campus brought back. The kids are much more of a hassle than they’re worth.

“Our restaurant had to be totally remodeled last year because the kids are always doing such destructive things. They put salt and pepper in the napkin holders, so when you pull out a napkin you get it all over you. They gouge the seats, they throw things, they make a lot of racket. They scare off business people and parents with small children. It’s not all the kids making the trouble, just a select few. The select few are making it intolerable.”

John Dalbey, an area supervisor for Round Table Pizza, was brought into the restaurant several months ago to try to resolve the lunchtime crisis. He said several booths had to be repainted and reupholstered. Students had burned cigarettes into the carpets and seats and carved crude graffiti into the walls and table tops. He said one customer recently witnessed a drug deal in the men’s room.

“Look, a good part of our business is the kids,” Dalbey said. “We don’t want to offend the kids--we don’t want to lose their business--because we make a couple of hundred dollars a day just from them. But we probably lost $400 a day in business from the grown-ups.”

Gone to Trustees

Many Tierrasanta residents, including Jamesa Selleck, director of the Tierrasanta Community Council, have taken their open-campus opposition to trustees of the San Diego Unified School District.

The school board last month approved a new policy that will allow the option for individual schools to study the benefits and drawbacks to closing their campuses during the lunch break. Serra High School is expected to be one of the first schools to set up a representative committee of school administrators, students and community leaders for such a study.

Tierrasanta residents point out that other county school districts, including Grossmont, Oceanside, Escondido, Sweetwater and Poway, have closed-campus policies that work well.

Selleck said she has received letters of endorsement from all restaurants in the area except Jack in the Box and from San Diego City Councilwoman Judy McCarty (who represents Tierrasanta), the San Diego Urban League and the Murphy Canyon Community Council, whose military constituents feed students into Serra.

Michael Price, vice principal at Serra, said administrators and teachers oppose the closed campus because it would mean the “extra burden” of having to police students, whom he believes are capable of behaving themselves at restaurants. He said that, out of a student body of 1,800, about 800 leave campus each day to eat at restaurants. Of that number, “maybe 18” are causing all the problems, he said.

A Difficult Position

Price finds himself in a difficult position. He’s caught between parents and merchants who want the campus closed, and students whose views he understands. As a student at Patrick Henry High School in the late 1960s, Price said, he championed the open-campus policy. He not only agrees with it, he believes in it.

“My biggest problem would be dealing with the morale of 1,800 students who have had the freedom and 85% of those who have used the freedom correctly,” Price said. “The staff also benefits. As it is, they can lunch together as co-workers and friends. If that stopped, I’d have a morale problem there, too.”

Price said the closed campus would mean buying more food for the cafeteria and hiring security guards whose workday would be limited to two hours.

“Where would you find such people?” Price said.

Since Serra has no space for students to eat indoors, students would have to eat in classrooms or hallways on cold or rainy days--as many do now anyway.

“Where would the additional money needed come from?” Price asked. “Would the school district provide it? Or would it come from school funds that are already stretched?”

Researched the Matter

Selleck said she has researched the matter thoroughly, surveying schools from San Diego to Sacramento, and, that, although the return to a closed campus caused problems at first, everybody agreed it was better in the long run.

Selleck said she was puzzled by a six-month teacher-parent committee at Patrick Henry High School in San Carlos that found many benefits to a closed campus but nevertheless concluded that the campus should remain open.

“They found (there would be) fewer tardies and truancies after lunch,” she said. “They found (there would be) less trespassing and vandalism in the neighborhood. They found (there would be) improved school spirit, fewer traffic accidents and reckless driving, improved student interaction and reduced use of drug and alcohol consumption.

“The negatives were increased smoking on campus, littering, lower student morale, increased supervision problems, more administrative time spent on discipline and long lunch lines. But even with those, the parents (who answered a PTA survey) voted 122 to 32 to close the campus. They took two staff votes. In September, it was 70 to 41 to close, and in December, 52 to 32. And still the policy stands.”

And may it always, said Bobby Day, at Henry, Serra and all other schools where student freedoms are as cherished as the bell at the end of the day.

Might Have to Fight

“I’d hate it if we had to eat at school,” Bobby said. “There would be more fights. You’d have to see people each day that you didn’t want to see, and you’d want to fight them. Maybe you’d have to, man. It could be bad.”

With the heavy metal band Poison roaring on the jukebox, singing “Bad to be Good” and “Living for the Moment,” and cigarette smoke engulfing the room, 15-year-old freshman Troy Adams said “the Stoners” are giving everybody a bad name. He said Stoners are a loose-knit gang that “does drugs and listens to heavy metal and likes to smoke, and not just cigarettes.”

He pointed to a raven-haired girl in the corner wearing a black dress.

“She’s Stoner all the way,” he said.

“With a closed campus, we’d have to eat in the rain and stuff,” said Jon Huneycutt, a 15-year-old sophomore. “They don’t have enough benches at school. They’d have to split us up, and we wouldn’t like that. We want to eat with our friends.”

Jon said he and most of his friends buy a slice of pizza and a 32-ounce soft drink at Round Table at a cost of $3 a meal. He said they eat the same food “pretty much every day” and that it poses no financial hardship. He said the food at Carl’s Jr. is even cheaper, which is why “a weirder crowd” hangs out there.

Bobby Day said the food at school costs less than food anywhere else but that “only nerds” eat at school.

“Pizza made out of what looks like Wonder Bread ain’t my idea of a good meal,” he said over a din of shouts and giggles. “So, until they tell me to stop, I’ll keep comin’ to Round Table. It’s my place, man. It’s my place.”