Ever since Shorewood’s new installation of lunch trays, ditching the old paper plate system, lunch trays have been mysteriously disappearing. Trays have not only been missing but left scattered around the school, which makes jobs harder for our school kitchen staff and janitors, who have to pick up and clean the trays. Returning your tray after eating lunch is not only basic manners, but helping make Shorewood a cleaner and sustainable environment.
But where are these missing trays going? Susie Piper Sack, the kitchen lead, who many students have seen giving out school meals, made a shocking discovery when recounting the lunch trays. “At the beginning of the school year we were given 300,” said Sac. “We noticed the stacks weren’t as high, and after counting we realized 80 were missing.” After those trays were soon replaced, an announcement was made to the school about this issue, but the problem didn’t stop.
“I did a recount and we were missing 120,” said Sac. “So if you add that to the first 80, it’s 200 total.”
Currently at Shorewood, five lunch tray drop offs are available on the first floor in the cafeteria, and one outside in the courtyard. This makes it easier for students to return trays without even going inside the building if they choose to eat lunch outside. However, this doesn’t stop students from putting their trays anywhere but the lunch tray drop offs. Lunch trays are left on tables, staircases, windowsills, and even in the bathrooms. This is not a good look for the maintenance of our school and causes extra work for our custodians to have to clean up.
“The custodian who empties the garbage cans outside finds a lot of them,” said Sac, “He found some on the field, in the bushes, and sometimes in the library.”
Returning your lunch tray is very important and even if you are having lunch outside or on upper floors, budgeting time to walk down and return it should be preplanned, or you shouldn’t use a lunch tray at all. Grabbing a lunch tray when buying school lunch is not required! The kitchen staff can give you your meal without one, and even wrap it in a plastic paper if you get food and want to take it to another floor of the school to do retakes or join a club.
“Hopefully the trays are ending up back at school,” said Sac. “I just hope people will return their trays… remember you don’t always need one.”
Shorewood’s kitchen staff and custodians work hard to serve meals and clean at our school, so do the good thing and pick up after yourself, return your lunch trays!
