Reversal of paperless tardy policy brings back issues
Tardy enforcement proves counterproductive by making students even later to their classes
May 29, 2018
Changes in how the tardy policies are enforced has caused a great deal of con- fusion this year for students.
The threat of automatic Saturday School for students caught up in randomly called tardy sweeps seemed to be the first sign that things were different this year.
And then after the lockdown it seemed things changed, again, when administrators restricted access to the building through a single entrance.
It seemed that administrators were taking advantage of the fact that all students were now all in one place and they could keep closer tabs on who was showing up late to their first classes of the day or after lunch.
For a time, students were getting mixed messages about what being tardy meant. Was it a lunch detention? Was it an automatic Saturday School assignment or was it just one of three strikes that could lead towards Saturday school?
These changes seemed to have caught students off guard who assumed that administrators would use the same practice they had used in previous years.
Two years ago Principal Brandi Hosack announced that students would no longer have to seek out tardy passes when they were late to class.
Instead, teachers would just count students tardy in the electronic gradebook system and students would be held accountable when they accumulated too many tardies.
Students and teachers seemed to like this change at the time because it prevented students from waste time in the halls searching for a hall monitor or waiting in line for them to write tardy passes.
I would like the administration to return to that system because all of the tardy sweeps and the new emphasis on recording tardies at the front desk has made students even later to class as they wait in lines that could take 10 to 20 minutes — or even longer — to get through at times.
Also no matter how early you leave to get to school in the morning, there is no guarantee you will get there on time. You have to add the outside factors into the equation and not just ignore them and then add them in when you feel like it.
There needs to be change because there shouldn’t be a huge crowd of students in the library for Saturday school because they were late.
But because of the lockdown the school really enforced so many new rules and safety precautions and things were bound to mess up.
They did help but now most of the rules that are having unintended consequences. We shouldn’t relive history with the same operations.
