People always say you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. Well, due to many of our underclassmen, Paint Branch’s open lunch - the only one in the Northeast Consortium - may be shortened by five minutes. The recommendation to shorten lunch was proposed to Ms. Dixon by some staff members to help decrease the horseplay in the halls, caused mainly by those students new to high school. The staff members who proposed this change believe that shortening lunch will stop the horseplay, but in all actuality no matter if lunch is 50 minutes, 45 minutes or 10 minutes, there are always immature kids so there will always be horseplay. Maybe the school should take disciplinary action against those who play and cause problems during lunch, instead of disciplining the entire school by taking away their free time. I am not a senior but I know that I would not like to have to rush back to school every day because sufficient I was not given time to go out for lunch. Seniors who are close to an LC may speed to avoid a tardy and this could cause accidents or other problems (I know, they should try to fix the LC problem first). Another side-effect to a shortened lunch period is that kids in all grades may not have time to make up a test or get extra help. Those five minutes at the beginning of lunch may seem like useless travel time, but some students need that time to get to a teacher’s classroom and still have time to make up a unit test or finish an important assignment. The administration has already taken away our privilege of ordering out, so to start shaving off time would simply reverse the great lunch period that Ms. Dixon created when she arrived at Paint Branch. Shortening our lunch period in order to end the horseplay is one solution being considered by the administration. In reality, there is absolutely no correlation between the two, and shortening lunch will not address the problem of immature students, it will just punish everyone.