This school year Powell High School is participating in an entirely new schedule, which  allows students to go home at 12:50 p.m. every single Friday afternoon.

The classes are longer, students have to be to school earlier and school is in session longer Monday-Thursday. It may seem like a win-win situation. However, there is one aspect of the new schedule that half the students will be paying for: first lunch (4a).

The absolute latest first lunch ever starts is at 11:1 0.am. It only occurs once a month on the Wednesday we have homeroom and even then it’s still too early. Normally (Monday-Thursday) it starts at 10:50. Brunch anyone? That’s not even the worst of it.

Since Fridays are early release, students who have first lunch go to “lunch” at 10:30. That’s not even brunch. Taco Johns is literally still serving breakfast at that time. Who wants to go get breakfast with me on Friday after sixth hour?

There’s one other problem with how early 4a lunch is. It doesn’t matter what day of the week it is. Students who have first lunch do not get to enjoy the lunch buffet at Pizza Hut. Excuse me, but I happen to be a teenager, meaning that I need pizza to survive. The school is depriving me of my unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by making my lunch too early to gorge myself with pizza, breadsticks and pasta.

Another difficult aspect of first lunch is how short it is – especially on Fridays, when we only have 26 minutes.

“It’s so difficult to get home and eat and then get back to school on time,” senior and first lunch prisoner Rylee Moore said. “Usually I’ll go out to lunch… and then I don’t get to eat and I get [ticked] off.”

Students who have second lunch seem to be better off.

“It’s just really short, man,” senior Dominic Johnson said. “I can’t finish making my pizza rolls when I go home sometimes. I wanna eat but I gotta skeet.”

Instead of making our lives difficult and more confusing along with causing us to starve, our lunches should be longer and later in the day.

Possibly combining the lunches or at least overlapping them would help a lot. Overlapping the lunches would give an extra 15 minutes to students who have to stuff their face with pizza rolls in order to sustain their lives. A teenager probably can average two pizza rolls per minute. In case you can’t do math, that makes 30 more pizza rolls available for a student to eat. What will make it even better, is if the lunches are later (say… after 4th hour instead of third). Students will have 15 extra minutes to eat everything on the buffet at Pizza Hut – and that’s what’s really important.