The situation. In my time at Huntley High School, I haven’t gone a school year without hearing complaints about off-campus lunch at Huntley. Or rather, lack thereof. Many students seem to be under the impression that the district could easily just allow an open campus and have withheld it for no reason other than they can.

Well, that’s not true. It’s true we don’t have an open campus, but there are logical reasons for it. Believe it or not, closed campus was not implemented for the sole purpose of making teenagers miserable.

A quick history lesson. Huntley High School has not always been closed campus. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Huntley High School students of all ages could roam the greater Huntley area during their lunch periods. Given the Mill St. location of the high school at the time, students had a few options on how to spend their lunch.

Some students went home. Many students would go to the park, which was less than a hundred feet away from the school. Those who could drive would often go to Dairy Mart, the only fast food establishment in the small town at the time. Some ambitious students (generally those with complete disregard for lawful speed limits) would tear down 47 to get to the Woodstock, the town with the nearest McDonald’s, back.

However, sometime in the late ‘80s or the early ‘90s, the open campus privilege was taken away. When the high school was moved to Harmony Road in 1995, off campus lunch was never discussed because the new location made it impractical. The Harmony Road Campus has never had an open campus.

In the present day, off campus lunch may have some restored relevance. While there have been no talks to implement an open campus policy, such a policy may not only be welcomed in the coming years, but even necessary.

On Facebook, a group was created by sophomore Parth Patel to work on a petition for students to be allowed in the courtyard during lunch. A poll in the group asked if off-campus lunch should also be petitioned, to which 79 of the 86 respondents answered in the affirmative. Students want off-campus privileges.

“Most students would like [off campus lunch]. There’s just a lot of problems and we have to solve those out,” said Patel.

Yes, there are some major problems that need to be addressed.

Location, location, location.

It is a common joke among Huntley High Schoolers that the school is in the middle of nowhere. While technically that’s not exactly true, the location is possibly the biggest and most obvious reason students have not enjoyed off-campus lunch privileges.

“I think the question to ask would be what would be the purpose of an open campus, and typically it’s because a number of reasons,” said Principal David Johnson, who has been working for Huntley High School for 19 years. “Number one, there are students who live close by the school and can get home either by walking, riding a bike, driving a car, fairly quickly, eat at home, and come back to school in a relatively short time.”

Huntley doesn’t even come close to meeting this. To our north, we have miles of corn fields with the occasional house. To the south and the east, we have Del Webb. Sure, this is a residential area, but anyone attending Huntley High School is probably 37 years too young to live there. To the west, there’s another sliver of Del Webb, and beyond that, more corn with the occasional subdivision several miles down.

There are roughly five houses that could house high schoolers within walking distance of the High School, but given the curved nature and high speeds of Harmony Road west of the high school, it would not be a safe walk anyways.

Anyone wishing to get home for lunch would have to take a car. Some people live five minutes away, and this would be a reasonable commute, but for the majority of the student body, the drive, with traffic could take 20 minutes.

“Another reason would be that the school is in an area where there are fast food restaurants or places to go get something to eat in a fairly short time,” said Johnson.

Over the past 20 years, Huntley has improved in this area. Students could reasonably travel to the I-90/Route 20 interchange truck stop or anywhere within about a 3-mile stretch (from Dairy Mart to Taco Bell) on 47.

 “I think it may cause a problem only for, by the time the bell rings, you get out to your car, and you have to drive at least 10 minutes just to get any place, so that would be the issue that I see,” said math teacher Shelly Kish, who volunteered to try to develop a project to give all upperclassmen full period lunch.

Timing would be a concern, especially given Huntley High School’s notoriously bad traffic, but given that not all students would have the same lunch period and have access to cars, traffic should be more reasonable. Students now have a large variety of fast food restaurants within striking distance given a full 47-minute lunch period.

Safety first.

A major concern for the authorities would be the safety of the students, and also ensuring that the off-campus lunch privileges would not be abused.

Every time students are in their cars, there is the risk for accident and injury, so a form giving parental permission would be a necessity. This would be relatively easy to deal with, though still an important concern.

The big concern with safety is the supervision. Allowing students to leave campus involves trusting them to return to school. In order to deal with the supervision, the district would have to come up with a plan to control who leaves and if they return.

The layout of the campus that makes the traffic so awful to deal with before and after school is set up in a way that could make a fairly straightforward solution for the supervision problem. Because our school was built with only one entrance (which is two to three fewer than it needs), one or two supervisors could easily moderate the lunchtime traffic flow. Stationed at the entrance, the supervisors could collect the IDs of the students leaving, and return them upon the arrival of the students in time for the next period.

Additionally, not all students would be given the opportunity to have off-campus lunch. It would be simply too many people to deal with, and the more kids allowed off, the more concerns that arise.

“We would begin to look at that as more of a privilege, some sort of incentive,” said Johnson. “So if you’re able to demonstrate that, maybe not as a freshman or sophomore, but as a junior or a senior, if you’ve got decent grades, if you’re not a behavior issue, there can be certain incentives built in that way.”

Conclusion: It’s definitely something that the students and the district should start talking about. An open-campus incentive could be an effective way of encouraging positive student behavior. (Let’s face it, the Raider Way tickets haven’t done much in that respect.) However, we aren’t quite ready for it yet.

 There is a lot of paperwork involved to clear the district of liability for the students during their lunches, to implement a system of supervision, and to deal with other logistical issues. The argument would be strengthened if some restaurants happened to move into the empty lot across the street from the school or in the corn field to the east of the school, but that is unlikely to happen in the next decade.

As the student body grows year after year, a type of open campus may be necessary to relieve the overcrowded cafeteria and the demand on the high school’s food service, but this is years away. Off-campus lunch is definitely in Huntley High School’s future. Just not tomorrow.