Editorials

A group of parents are brainstorming ways to keep more Berkeley High School students on campus for lunch by providing hot lunches and places to sit and eat. 

They want benches, tables, gazebos and a temporary shelter in the main courtyard and are looking at the possibility of providing a mobile food preparation unit (also referred to as a “roach coach”) on campus.  

The mobile food unit would be able to provide students with 400 lunches a day.  

“With this little bit of space we want to serve as many students as possible,” said Gail Keleman, chair of the Berkeley High School Master Plan and Land Use Committee.  

The food unit could take up to four months to be approved, according to Dana Richards, a teacher at the school who serves on the committee. 

Eventually, the committee wants to develop the food court concept at the high school because downtown merchants have long-complained of up to 3,300 students infiltrating their businesses during lunch.  

The school has been without a cafeteria since it was damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The school does have a food facility – referred to as “Elsie’s Shack” – for making lunches for low-income students. But that facility is slated for demolition as part of $20 million in improvements to the school. A few members of the committee have also suggested taking the equipment and constructing a new permanent facility instead of paying up to $80,000 for the temporary facility. Another suggestion is to move some food services into the “Good Food Café,” a state-of-the-art kitchen now used by children with special needs to learn valuable skills and provide meals for campus staff.  

All of these suggestions are still early in the planning stages but they are part of the work the committee has focused on for the past four years. Since 1996, Keleman said the Berkeley High School Master Plan and Land-use committee has looked at ways to create a uniform look for campus improvements. Before then, Keleman said many improvements were piecemeal projects with no unifying theme. 

“We would get a tomato plant next to a Redwood tree. It was a mish-mash of things,” she said. “We wanted to group so we didn’t end up with benches all over the place and Redwood Trees next to fruit trees.” 

We wanted a group so we would