Dodging people throwing chips, jumping over half-eaten sandwiches and leaping over seas of spilled soda in the hallways has gone on too long. The school’s hallways during lunch have become an obstacle course, and we need to put an end to it.

When kids are five years old, they learn to pick up their toys when they are done playing, so it shouldn’t be a hard concept by the age of 14 to pick up your trash when you are done eating. It seems simple enough: you eat it, you throw it away.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a difficult task for many students who prefer to eat next to their spilled drink and empty wrapper, hoping that someone will just kick it far enough that they won’t have to look at it anymore.

As a result, our administration has taken to posting signs all over the school with pictures of trash left by students during lunch in an attempt to show how disgusting lunch scraps on the floor truly are. Teachers have also begun to kick students out of certain hallways because they leave such a mess. That is just embarrassing. Not being able to eat anywhere you want during an open lunch because you’re too messy is ridiculous.

In addition, many clubs are focusing on cleaning up our school. The LEO club, National Honor Society and Club ROYAL have all attempted to address this problem. However, they have all been unsuccessful in improving the overall trash problem in our school because they are simply picking up their peers’ messes.

In order to successfully clean up our school we all need to take responsibility for ourselves. If being kicked out of hallways and looking at pictures of leftover trash isn’t convincing enough, then maybe if building services stopped picking up after us students would start to take responsibility for their trash. Students need to stop being lazy and clean up after themselves before our school becomes a complete landfill.