Photo Credit: KAYLEE OBERFIELD
BY BRANDON SLOANE
When you walk in, you see trash spread across the tables and pieces of food littering the ground and the bathrooms have an overpowering stench that is almost unbearable. This sounds like the inside of a dirty fast food joint, but in reality, it’s our very own Cooper City High School cafeteria after a typical lunch hour. Every afternoon our new multi-million dollar cafeteria resembles a garbage dump because of the students’ sheer lack of consideration.
Trash in a cafeteria may seem like a minute problem that doesn’t hurt anyone, but nothing could be farther from the truth. This is a problem that affects everyone, faculty and students alike.
Students leaving their mess in the cafeteria make the staff’s job more difficult then it needs to be. In fact, Building Supervisor Jamie Curran stated that the food service and janitorial staffs each have to work four hours each day after school cleaning up the cafeteria. Curran went on to state that this work time could be cut in half if students would just throw away their trash.
The issue with the cafeteria goes much deeper than just a big mess. The extra work given to the cafeteria workers and custodians requires them to work an extra hours. Where does the money come from to pay for the extra work being done? It comes right out of our pockets. Curran spoke about how the additional work done by the faculty is factored into price of our lunches.
However this predicament isn’t just limited to the cafeteria, there is also difficulty maintaining the bathrooms. Everywhere you look you see graffiti, toilet paper, and sometimes even whole lunches dumped in and around the toilets, making the bathrooms disgusting and almost unusable. It seems incredible that in two short years our new bathrooms look as bad as the old bathrooms.
In order to fix this situation, the staff needs the student body to clean up after themselves. It takes less than a minute to pick up your tray and put it in the garbage. As students we should have respect for the school. It is basically our second home. We are here 5 days a week for 7 hours a day and we should treat CCHS with care and consideration. It comes down to valuing our school and not letting our multi-million dollar cafeteria turn into cesspool of grime. Whenever you see one of those little white trays laying on a table with garbage on it, don’t just ignore it and let it sit there. Do the right thing and pick it up. If even just a few people started doing that once a day, you’d be surprised at how far it would go. Together we can revive the cafeteria to its original splendor, one tray at a time.
