Not eating lunch at school

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If its sensory overload or something to do with other kids maybe he can stay in the classroom with a teacher and eat lunch in the quiet while the other kids are in the cafeteria.

Our son has a very limited diet - it's improving ever so slightly with time but overall, it's not great.
He eats very little at school but eats like a maniac at home, so I give him a really big breakfast - 3 bowls of cereal and a piece of toast and then he eats more toast when he gets home. not ideal but at least he isn't starving at school which I am concerned affects his concentration.

My daughter usually doesn't eat much at school either. Most days she'll only drink her milk and maybe eat her yogurt. Some days just the milk. She won't even eat her apple because its whole and there are imperfections on the skin. She used to eat them like that, but now she won't anymore. She'll only eat them sliced- the imperfections are harder to see. Occasionally she wil eat more, but it's rare.

Its less an total overload, mostly its simply an amount of sensory input that makes you uncomfortable. Just like most NTs wont be able to eat with comfort at an high trafficked place. I dont think that going away for 15 minutes wont help that, because if you feel stressed that doesnt go away in the minute you are away from the stress. Sure it will be better, but too really feel comfortable, it takes its time.

I did the same thing. I don't remember what-all it was-- I know I could not stomach the hot lunch, hated being in the lunch room, could not tolerate the way food tasted after being warm in baggies in my lunch box all morning, was constantly in terror of being teased for eating the wrong things/eating them in the wrong way (you were supposed to wad your Fruit Roll Up up and stuff it in your mouth, not tear it into little strips and eat each one slowly) (chewed too loudly), whatever. It amounted to being nervous enough to not be able to eat lunch.

Grandma solved this problem by having me eat lunch at home. Practically every day. From, like, second grade all the way through eighth. I do not believe this to be a viable, or even permissible, solution nowadays.

In high school, it was again with the same thing-- I ate the wrong food (peanut butter and brown sugar sandwiches) or I ate the food in the wrong way (say, by not folding the cafeteria pizza into a small square and stuffing it down) or I made too much of a mess when I took a bite (leaving little bits of food in the corners of my mouth). For part of one year, a few kids were able to eat in a separate classroom-- the the principal canned that. For part of one year, I was ignored as I ate in a stairwell, provided that no one else was with me-- then they decided to have a problem with that. I started wolfing my sandwich in a toilet stall...

...and then I stopped eating lunch altogether. I lived-- and probably would have survived if I had started skipping lunch a decade earlier. Feed him a good breakfast, feed him as soon as he gets home. Unless you're getting behavioral issues specifically in the afternoon that you think are related to hunger, it's really not that huge of a deal.

You know, even if they don't have "open campus" anymore, you could probably get something put in the IEP if you really had to. If you do think it is causing behavioral or academic problems, especially. Of course this will make your kid "stand out" so you have to weigh that factor in as well.

(Back in my day, In elem. my mom would sometimes take me to get pizza a block away from school, and I had a friend I could go home and eat lunch with, when invited, and with a note In Jr. High we had a closed campus b/c for some reason JHS kids were treated the worst and had the most rules. I went to the library often times at lunch but I could not eat there. In HS we had open campus, and I could just wander the neighborhood, and pick up a snack.)

Eating lunch at school was a problem for me because of bullying and anxiety. I usually just didn't eat.

From kindergarten-third grade I lived near the school and ate lunch at home. Fourth and fifth grade were the worst. My mother gave me permission to eat in the classroom of an old teacher I had but I was told that I must have forged the note and they wouldn't let me, even after finding out that I didn't forge it and the teacher was ok with it. They complained that my lunches weren't nutritious enough too, not that it mattered since I didn't eat them. In sixth grade I ate outside.

I'm not sure if I can even remember this but my mother has a funny story about how once at snack time in kindergarten they gave me trail mix for a snack. I knocked it on the floor and said it was for the squirrels. I also wouldn't drink regular milk and they wouldn't let me have chocolate milk because "it was for the higher grades" so I just went without. In second grade I would get in trouble for not eating snack at snack time. I didn't like fig newtons and a lot of kids brought those (we each had turns to bring snacks for everyone).

I didn't outgrow not liking to eat in front of other people for a long time, at least until my late teens or older.

When I was little I hated the school lunches because the cafeteria was loud and the food tasted bad.In second grade my teacher tried to make me eat a sandwich because she said I had not eaten enough of my lunch,it was awful,I almost cried trying to force that terrible tasting thing down.I wadded what I could up in the napkin.
When I got older and you could skip lunch I just went to the playground.I tried bringing lunches a few times but they got stolen and I still didn't want to go into that noisy cafeteria.