During our recent travels, we encountered something new. During the lunchtime frame, we saw groups of high school students walking around a shopping plaza looking for lunch. We saw these students getting Chick-fil-A, Starbucks at the grocery store, and Trader Joe’s for quick snacks. We were surprised by the number of students.

As we saw all these students, my first thought was concern about their safety and the risk the school was taking by kids leaving the school or campus grounds. My second thought was, don’t schools fight and advocate for funding to feed children? I did some research on this because I wanted to understand the situation before I started with a “back when I was younger.” The first thing I found is that schools want to introduce a more independent lifestyle to help high schoolers prepare for college life. I agree with this. I think it is important to introduce “life skills” at an earlier age. As an Accredited Financial Counselor®, I am going to use budgeting as an example. I think that paying for lunch on their own will help introduce spending plan skills. If a child receives money daily, they must manage within that amount. If given a weekly or monthly allowance, the students learn to prioritize and manage limited resources in real time.

Addressing budgeting from a school perspective, I understood from the research that schools have an “open campus” cafeteria policy because the cafeteria may not be big enough or staffed with enough people to handle the capacity of students. I am not sure I really believe this is a valid reason. I think lunch times can be staggered, and that would mitigate the capacity problem. If the capacity issue is that the kitchen equipment is not adequate enough to handle the amount of food that needs to be cooked/prepared, then of course that is a different issue, but I think there may be solutions to that problem. For example, perhaps partnering with local vendors could expand options without overloading the kitchen.

I want to focus on school risk. How are the schools mitigating risk not only to the students but to the local community? There is the possibility of increased incident reports in the local area. How are students’ whereabouts being tracked? Are parents signing some kind of waiver or agreement stating that they are aware their child is leaving school grounds for lunch? Then there is the question of what responsibility, if any, the local businesses have. Yes, they benefit from the business, but do they have a responsibility to protect the community and their customers? These are questions worth exploring to understand the balance between independence and safety.

The other reason why I am writing about this this week is because I know that I am taxed for funding for schools. For example, my property bill for the house we own in Florida has four itemized “School” related taxes. If this money isn’t being spent to support the things the school needs to handle the capacity they have, where is it going? I know it is not all going to school staff salaries. It’s worth asking how these funds are allocated to ensure they benefit students effectively.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Does the school in your community have an open campus policy? If so, what experiences have you had with open campus policies? How do you think schools can better support student independence while ensuring safety? Let’s discuss!

Originally published on LinkedIn on September 8, 2025. [Read it here]