Should I let students eat snacks in class?
While allowing snacks helps hungry students focus when lunch is late, it frequently invites severe pest infestations like ants and mice. The freedom also opens the door to extreme distractions, with students making full deli sandwiches on their desks or bringing in whole cheesecakes that derail class time and evaluations.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Enforcing strict no-food policies or relying on school-wide cafeteria rulesDid this help you?
- 2Setting specific rules regarding quiet, discrete, and non-disruptive snacksDid this help you?
- 3Requiring students to clean up after themselves or providing cleaning tools like a handheld broomDid this help you?
- 4Revoking snacking privileges for the individual or the entire class if messes or disruptions occurDid this help you?
- 5Relying on state-level science lab rules to legally ban all food in the classroom.Did this help you?
- 6Telling the student to put the food away because it is not lunchtime.Did this help you?
- 7Ignoring the behavior and studiously avoiding the eyes of other adults to maintain composure.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I look over and this kid suddenly has a whole cheesecake on his desk and is eating it with a metal fork.”source ↗
“I teach 10th grade, and their lunch isn’t until 12:50. I know thats normal lunch time, but when you are trying to focus in class and have an empty stomach, it’s hard to.”source ↗
“A lot of teachers call me crazy for this, but I don’t know, the kids seem to appreciate me for it and they luckily don’t take advantage of me for that.”source ↗
“Absolutely not. I teach middle school. They are messy. They leave crumbs. Then I get ants, or worse.”source ↗
“I had a kid pull out a can of frosting during state testing.”source ↗
“I used to, but in my current building there is an enormous mouse infestation. If any crumbs are leftover the floors and desks are covered with mouse turds the next morning.”source ↗
“I taught either SpEd or inclusion classes, so there were times I'd have kids who had not been taught not to take food right out of other kids' hands or off their desks. When that happened I had to have no eating policies”source ↗
“I once had a student who would take a whole set of materials necessary to make a sandwich out of his bag and proceed to make said sandwich on his desk. We're talking knife, bread, lettuce, mayonnaise, tomatoes, deli meats, and more.”source ↗
“The day after I told my sixth graders they could eat in my room, I had a kid bring a bell pepper and eat it like an apple. It was shockingly loud.”source ↗
“One pulled out one of those big containers of peanut butter. The ones that look like a big Pringle's can. Started eating out of it during my evaluation. Principal made some note along the lines of "saw student eating peanut butter in class, this is a distraction that you should have dealt with"”source ↗
Where this came up
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- 10How to balance classroom control with letting students talk