School serves new schedule

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005 | 8:35 a.m.

There's a new elective at Eldorado High School -- lunch.

Facing a campus 700 students over capacity, Principal Richard Carranza moved lunch to the end of the academic day to ease overcrowding in the cafeteria.

It worked. Fast.

The number of lunches served in the cafeteria last month dropped by nearly 30 percent from the prior year -- from 6,123 to 4,387. Students, who start at 7 a.m., are free to leave at 12:40, the end of the last regularly scheduled class period, and many do.

"I've never liked school food," said senior Bobbi Moorefield, who planned to eat lunch Monday at McDonald's. "Now I can go home for lunch or somewhere else if I want."

The school has one mandatory break for food at 8:55 a.m. -- a 10-minute in-class "nutrition break" -- but school officials have seen "an unexpected side benefit," Carranza said.

The numbers of students buying breakfast before school starts has shot up dramatically, to 1,683 meals served last month from just 658 in September 2004.

"The kids are more alert in their morning classes and we're seeing better classroom behavior," Carranza said. "In the afternoon a lot of our students who are walkers go home for lunch and the parents say they love that."

School officials say they don't know for sure why the number of breakfasts served increased, but anecdotal evidence points to students who normally would have skipped breakfast or had a light breakfast and eaten a meal at lunch.

Carranza's decision to move lunch to ease overcrowding is emblematic of the growing pains of the fifth-largest school district in the nation.

The district has a plan to do $180 million of school improvement work in the next few years, and Eldorado's cafeteria isn't on the list.

Carranza said he had to do something as push came to shove, almost literally, in the crowded cafeteria.

Last winter parents tried to force the issue, calling the fire marshal on rainy days when they knew the cafeteria would be over capacity.

Carranza considered switching his school's schedule to four separate lunch periods, as the also-overcrowded Las Vegas High School has chosen to do. But he vetoed the idea after realizing he and the rest of his staff would be spending the bulk of their day supervising the cafeteria.

"Our administrators would become the highest-paid security monitors in the district," Carranza said.

Carranza started experimenting with lunch last year and instituted the schedule for the entire student body this year. Parents have been supportive of the move as a short-term solution.

Sally Achord, whose son Patrick is a junior at Eldorado, said the district's long-term answer is a new high school in the area.

"They're building new schools all over this valley," she said. "They could find some land for us somewhere."

Carolyn Edwards, who is president of the school district commission that recommends school attendance boundaries, said the needs of older campuses, such as Eldorado, which was built in 1973, can't be ignored.

"We should have sited a new high school out there a long time ago that would have opened this year and given those (existing) schools some relief," Edwards said. "Unfortunately we've had a real problem finding land."

Several potential parcels in the area have been discussed but have not yet been approved by the Clark County School Board.

Emily Richmond covers education for the Sun. She can be reached at (702) 259-8829 or by e-mail at emily@lasvegassun.com.