Silent lunch for students at Elgin's Lowrie School has parents talking

Twenty minutes of silence has caused a lot of noise for officials at Lowrie Elementary School in Elgin.

After students exhibited rowdy and disrespectful behavior in the lunchroom, the school instituted a silent policy during Wednesday's four lunch periods.

Lowrie parent Michael Miller was outraged after his second-grade twins came home and told him about their day at school.

"It's an abuse of power," he said. "Kids are full of energy. It's their release."

Miller called the school to talk to Principal Kelly O'Brien about the move, as well as her superiors at Elgin Area School District U-46's central office.

He said he was told this was a new policy.

For the second year in a row, the school is taking part in the Positive Behavior Implementation and Support program.

The program, which addresses social-emotional behavior, is used at all U-46 elementary schools, though schools use various teaching methods.

As part of that program at Lowrie, the school had gone over lunchroom expectations at the beginning of the year, with students expected to talk quietly during their 20-minute meal breaks. That apparently wasn't working well enough.

O'Brien said she was approached by the school's lunch staff, who had asked "for a little support."

Wednesday's silent lunch was what she called a "reteaching."

Afterward, O'Brien sent home a message to parents via the district's reverse calling system.

"Since the beginning of the school year, the expectation for lunchroom behavior has been established and retaught many times in the classroom and lunchroom," she said in the message. "The children have been given daily opportunities to practice."

Approaching the midpoint of the first quarter, "children are not demonstrating expectations on a regular basis. Children overall are not finishing their lunch on time," she said.

O'Brien said she does not "anticipate the silent lunch being a permanent change, with the hope that the students will be more willing or able to demonstrate their understanding of the lunchroom expectations in the near future."

Lunch Thursday was a quiet lunch, but not a silent one, she said.

While Lowrie appears to be the only U-46 school to have implemented a silent lunch, parents of students at J.B. Nelson Elementary in Batavia were outraged in 2005 after a "talk light" monitor was installed in the lunchroom to measure noise levels.

It turned from green to yellow and eventually red if lunch students hit a noise level of 75 to 80 decibels.

When former Principal Brenda Sand, who installed the $1,000 light, left the school in 2006, "there was a very strong consensus to not use it," school secretary Ann Rego said. The light "sat around in storage for three years and then we auctioned it off at one of our PTO fundraisers. It's probably sitting in someone's garage right now."

Lunch: Noise monitor raised eyebrows at Batavia school