GUSTINE – Gustine High School will host a community meeting tonight (Thursday), giving the public an opportunity to weigh with their thoughts on whether the school should go to a closed campus at lunchtime.

Concerns about students driving off campus for lunch, regular complaints from the public about student behavior and littering at lunchtime and occasional fights have school leaders re-thinking Gustine High’s open campus policy, Principal Dennis Shaw said.

“Before we do anything, I want to listen to the pros and cons of how people feel about it,” he explained. “There are a lot of different ways we can look at this, but we need to start by having the discussion, and we will evaluate it after that point.”

Shaw said lunchtime complaints about students littering at lunchtime are common.

Tardies are another issue as students return to campus late for their afternoon classes.

Under a new policy, students can lose their open campus privilege if they are tardy after lunch, Shaw said, but the new policy does not appear to have solved that problem.

Shaw said a survey of area high schools found that most have at least a partially closed campus, in which open-campus privileges are extended only to juniors and seniors in good academic standing and with no disciplinary problems.

“There are only a few schools, ourselves and Orestimba, that really don’t have any restrictions,” Shaw noted.

Unlike Orestimba, which is beyond lunchtime walking distance from stores and restaurants, Gustine High sits at the end of Main Street, and directly across the street from McDonald’s.

The vast majority of Gustine High’s 570 students head off campus for lunch, Shaw said, some driving and some walking.

“Lunchtime always makes you nervous. At the very minimum 450 of our kids leave campus for lunch. Even when we had only 300 kids on campus, you were always concerned about kids getting into cars and driving at lunchtime,” Shaw said. “The biggest concern is the safety of our students, but it is also a real liability risk.”

The principal said he believes the time has come to take a hard look at whether the campus should be closed, a decision which ultimately would have to come through the school board.

“It is something I have been thinking about for some time,” he reflected. “Even if we were to close the campus for some or all students, it is going to take a substantial amount of time before we were ready to put those changes in place. The question would be how we managed that.”

Shaw said parents, business people, members of the general public and students are invited to share their thoughts on the topic at tonight’s meeting, which begins at 6 p.m. in the school auditorium.

Student body leaders have been asked to poll students on the subject, and letters have gone out to parents and business people advising them of the meeting.