School Safety
Improving School Climate: The Lunchroom
A positive school climate is essential for students’ learning and academic achievement. This series explores how the SECOND STEP and STEPS TO RESPECT programs can improve the climate of a school’s “problem areas”—the playground, the bus, and the lunchroom—and gives you practical tips to get started on making these areas safer.
Physical Aspects of the Lunchroom
The first step of any climate-improvement plan is assessment. If you don’t have a baseline idea of your assets and challenges, you won’t know how to maintain or improve them. The Program Guide of the STEPS TO RESPECT program features worksheets for just this purpose.
Get a pen and paper and try to be a “fly on the wall” in the lunchroom during all lunch periods, preferably at least twice. Jot down impressions about seating arrangements, placement of tables, noise levels, and cleanup. Look at how students interact: do they refuse to let others sit near them, exhibit bad table manners, leave their lunches uneaten, or fail to clean up after eating?
Next, sketch out a map or floor plan of the lunchroom, noting hazardous features, locations that provide opportunities for bullying, and visual barriers to supervision.
Then survey students and staff to find out their perceptions and concerns about the lunchroom environment.
Rules for the Lunchroom
Once you know the problems, you can start to work on solutions. With the help of students, teachers, and other staff, develop a short, simple list of behavioral expectations for the lunchroom. Try to use positive wording, for example, “Use your inside voice” instead of “no yelling.” To get you started, here are the lunchroom rules from Chautauqua Elementary School in Vashon, WA, which use the acronym SMILE:
- Stay seated until excused. Eat and drink at your seat.
- Make sure that you are kind to others at all times.
- Inside voices must be used in the cafeteria.
- Leave for recess only when excused.
- Every day, clean up your own lunch space (table and floor). Take trays to assigned place.
Post copies of your rules in large, easy-to-read lettering in several places in the lunchroom, and include a copy in student handbooks or parent newsletters. Hang extra sets of the SECOND STEP problem-solving posters and the STEPS TO RESPECT posters in the room as well, as reminders of how to behave respectfully. Consider having a few minutes of silence (while listening to classical music, perhaps) at the end of each lunch period.
Supervision in the Lunchroom
You can make supervision in the lunchroom easier by systematizing cleanup and dismissal. If children are assigned to seating (by class, for example), they can be dismissed in order and do their cleanup during silent time.
If you are using the STEPS TO RESPECT program, be sure that all lunchroom monitors receive STEPS TO RESPECT training in receiving bullying reports. Not only will they be better equipped to handle lunchroom behavior, but students will trust the supervisors more and the school population will share a common vocabulary that can improve the climate for everyone.
