Students at Albany Park’s Theodore Roosevelt High School, fed up with the quality of school lunches, brought their own food to the 3436 W. Wilson Ave. school today in hopes a boycott of school lunch will bring about a change in the program administrated by Philadelphia-based food service company Aramark on behalf of Chicago Public Schools.

“The students found that if they boycotted lunch, that Aramark wouldn’t get paid, and they saw that as a means of forcing the company and Chicago Public Schools to provide higher quality food,” civics teacher Timothy Meegan told Chicago radio station WBBM-AM, according to a report filed by Mariam Sobh for the station.

Reached this afternoon, Meegan estimated that 80 percent of the students at the school took part in the boycott.

“It went very well,” he said, noting that all of the sophomores and juniors took part and most of the senior class. Not too many freshman participated, he added.

The boycott grew out of a project launched by students in all five of Meegan’s civics classes.

“In Civics we are working on project based learning. We brainstormed a list of potential issues to work on, narrowed the list to three, and finally voted to work on improving school lunch,” the students explain on their website, “The School Lunch Project: Culinary Denial.” The site outlines concerns by students about the quality of their school lunches, complete with photographs of food apparently being served at the high school.