In Texas, it's common for high schools to be open campus, meaning teens with cars can leave school to have lunch off campus. For those Folcs who lived in big cities like New York, is it the same there, or is everyone locked in? If it's one way now, was it different in the late eighties when Lois and Clark were presumably going to high school?

I can't speak directly about New York or the late eighties BUT, I went to a 'big city' high school in the early seventies and my son attended high school not that long ago.

Basically a closed campus isn't actually locked although it might be fenced. Students with cars could (and did) leave campus by simply avoiding the 'monitors' (aka wardens). Seniors were frequently given more leeway - partly because many of them were close enough to 18 for them to claim they were legally adults.

On my son's closed campus high school, the juniors and seniors with cars went across state lines to go to lunch. The ring leaders at the time were the sheriff's daughter and my restaurant critic son.

(And yes, the kids I went to school with and my son thirty years later all used prison terms to describe the staff.)

I went to high school in the Bronx. No one ever left for lunch. People either brought theirs with them or ate cafeteria food. Almost no one had a car and you needed a car to make it to the local food places and get back in time to get to the next class.

Also, the front doors to the school would lock and the receptionist would have to buzz you in if you left. I don't think it was really against the rules to leave for lunch, but no one ever did. The most we did was sometimes eat on the lawn in the backyard. (My school overlooked the water - you could see Manhattan across the way.)

The high school I work for has a closed campus, but students still jump the fence when no one is looking (there's an abandoned housing development next to the school, so there's plenty of places to hide). There's really no place to eat off campus that can be reached quickly enough to eat and get back in time for class, unless there are street vendors around -- the nearest market and the nearest restaurant (which is sit-down) are both a couple of blocks away.

The high school I went to in the 90's, which is in the same town but is 10 times the size of the one I now work at, did have an open campus policy for seniors, though I seldom took advantage of it because I didn't have the money to eat out. There are a dozen restaurants, both fast food and sit down, across the street from the school.

I guess it would depend upon the policies of the different schools and where they were located. (The schools I just described are in a smallish town that is part of a large metropolitan area called the Inland Empire, aka IE).

The High School I went to in the 70s was quite large and had an open campus. Completely open to all grades. You'd get detention for cutting class, but the school itself was open and you could come and go as you pleased. (This was in a city in NY, about 90 miles from NYC.)

The High School my kids went to was closed. The rules were you could not leave, but the doors themselves were not locked. Years later my kids confessed to me that they frequently snuck away, especially for lunch.

My high school in the 1990s in a Detroit suburb (the same one I live in), had an open campus policy for juniors and seniors, although many students under that age left.

I am pretty sure it has since gone to a closed campus, at east with regards to lunch. However the district runs several programs that involve high school students spending part of their day at one campus and part at another, that undermines open campuses.

In Detroit itself, students are much less likely to have cars, and so leaving for lunch is much less more difficult. I will ask some of my coworkers who might know if I think of it to see if there are actual policies on the matter.

Dtroit does, even in middle schools, have metal detectors at the main entrance largely to iscoarge bringing in guns. This makes me guess high schools try to avid letting people leave more than necessary.

There's one school in my district where not only is it a closed campus, but the kids aren't allowed to bring their own food. Everyone gets free lunch, whether they like it or not, to reduce the chance that someone will smuggle something in (like drugs or alcohol). In addition, at this school, the kids have a very strict dress code and school-issued t-shirts they have to wear (as does the staff). There's a full-time cop on campus, and kids have occasionally been tased for misbehaving. This school has a very small student population--a kid has to get expelled from another school to go there.

As far as I know, there are no metal detectors at any of the campuses, possibly because guns are almost never found on students who get into trouble. There was an attempted murder on my campus a few years ago, but the perpetrator used a steel pipe he'd stolen from the abandoned housing development next door and lay in wait for the victim (who did survive, though he was in a coma for a few weeks). Most kids caught with weapons have small knives, and those are rare. Most fighting consists of kids whaling away at each other until security or their friends drag them apart. A few months ago, someone shot a hole in one of the skylights in the library I run, but the bullet came from off campus and was apparently fired into the air (accidentally or on purpose is anybody's guess; whoever fired the bullet was never caught), so metal detectors wouldn't have helped at all. The bullet broke a hole in the skylight, which was patched with putty until the insurance company came through; luckily, it was an extremely warm and dry winter this year, so the skylight didn't leak on the books.

I went to high school in Arlington VA (DC suburb). Only seniors were allowed off campus for lunch, but lots of younger kids snuck off anyway. This was in the 90s.