Recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed many students to go back to in-person school. However, it has caused overpopulation to be one of the biggest conflicts students and staff face here at Denmark. It’s near impossible to enter a lunchline, breakfast line, car rider line, etc. without having to wait for an extended amount of time causing multiple problems for the students and staff in multiple different ways. 

The wait for the lunchline is an exhausting task for students to have to endure. It takes an average of fifteen minutes to get through the lunch line, half of the allotted time we’re given to eat. “The lunch line is always backed up, and my friends do not get their lunch until the end of lunch period with five minutes left,” says sophomore, William Malek. If you also take into consideration the limited amount of time each student and staff member is given to eat and socialize, you can begin to understand just how little the time we’re given for lunch is.

Not only are the lines for food long, so are the lines to get in the school. Car rider lines make students wait for extremely long periods of time to get in their car and on the road. This makes life very difficult for the staff who have to direct the traffic and the students who just want to go home after a long day. If you get to the school around 8:05, it’ll take around ten to fifteen minutes to get dropped off at the front of the school. The only way to get to class on time is to sprint there or you’ll be late. The student parking lot is super full, causing students to have to park at the far corners and also sprint to class. People have been late to class for weeks because the lines to get in school are so long, and the student parking lot is so full. “The worst part about overcrowding at school is getting to my classes. I am usually always tardy, or I am just barely on time,” Malek states. “My mom looks at my attendance, and when she sees my Infinite Campus she thinks I am skipping classes.” 

Having so many students in Denmark negatively affects almost all of the students’ and staffs’ lives. This even includes the bus drivers. “It made the beginning of the year more challenging because I had more students than I had seats,” says Scott who is the bus driver of bus twenty-four. It’s Scott’s third year as a bus driver here at Denmark. “They’re a lot more students returning this year than last year. I have more routes so I have a lot more students on my bus than I normally would’ve.” Scott goes on to say. Scott’s story is the same as most bus drivers this year. More students equal more routes, which in turn makes it take longer for them and the students to get home. 

Our Denmark staff and student body are both doing an amazing job slowly adjusting to the difficulties of overcrowding and trying to implement solutions to alleviate the problems. As the year goes on, we’ll get better at it; as one large Dane family.