By MONIQUE VARELA and MARSHALL SCOTT

Citrus Valley High School students received an email from the Citrus Valley administration team on March 31 explaining the new hallway policy during lunch. On the first day back from spring break, students would no longer be allowed inside of the buildings during lunch. This new rule was due to the amount of trash students were leaving in the hallways which caused many teachers to complain about the messes.

The new hallway expectation became  active on April 4. Only one entrance from every building would be opened and have a security guard at the entrance. The guards look for tickets given to students to prove they have somewhere to be rather than loitering in the hallways. 

The tickets are different colors depending on the building, name of the teacher and ‘lunch pass’ on the top. Teachers were given these tickets in order to let their students into the building after the grace period. These lunch passes are only to be given for educational purposes such as tutoring, test retakes, quiz corrections and club meetings.

Becky Gidcumb, environmental science teacher at Citrus Valley, said, “I’m in favor of the hallway policy at lunch because we get too many kids in here. They run around, they make a mess, they disrupt the teachers. This is supposed to be our duty free time. We can choose whether or not we have students that come into our classrooms to get help. It can be very distracting when there’s many kids in the hallway creating a mess, and havoc.” 

Students got this privilege revoked because of the amount of trash that was left in the hallways, such as chip wrappers, candy wrappers, food, etc. The messes were mainly in the E building. 

Within the email that to students and parents, there were written consequences if students were to be found in the hallway without a ticket. These consequences include lunch detention, after school detention, campus cleanup and more. 

Karen Ravelo, a sophomore at Citrus Valley, is not in favor of the rule and said this, “not all of us have a place to sit during lunch time. It’s nice to have a place where we feel comfortable to have lunch.” 

Students who do not have a ticket but need to talk to a teacher must be accompanied by security or admin. These hallway expectations are to exclude inclement weather, such as heatwaves, rain and other potentially dangerous weather. 

Though there is a way to still enter these buildings with the five minute grace period. The grace period allows students to enter the buildings after the bell rings. If students do not make it within this grace period they will need to have a ticket to enter the building.