It’s 8:02 a.m.: you pull into the parking lot, and the tardy bell has already rung. This isn’t the first time you’ve been tardy by a long shot. It’s probably your fifth, or sixth. And your first period teacher keeps writing you up.
So let’s say today is your sixth tardy. In a few days, you wait for your office referral from your first period teacher, but when you get it, your punishment is no longer an hour of after school detention—instead it is ISS. Then, after your ninth tardy, your punishment is OSS. Seriously, students have to miss an entire six-hour school day because we were a couple minutes late to class six or more times?
To most students, these punishments aren’t effective. Honestly, they’re just detrimental to student learning and cause more work for the teacher because he has to spend extra time teaching students what they missed.
Another problem with this tardy policy is that whether your tardies are excused or unexcused does not make a difference. If I had six doctors’ appointments during a semester and they all caused me to be late, I shouldn’t be penalized for that.
It’s not fair to tell me that I have to go to ASD for three days of coming to school late if I have a good reason. Would you rather me just take an absence and not come at all? If I do that, at least my doctor’s note would count for something.
I’ve done this, and so have some of my friends, and it wasn’t so bad. We’re basically just doing the same thing the policy is enforcing; we’re just getting counted as absent and only missing one class period instead of the whole day.
But this creates a whole other issue because students miss full class periods, so they’re missing all the material from that day.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that being tardy is okay. I’m well aware that I am a lazy student and could easily get here on time. But the punishments Northwood uses are not effective. Why not continue to give ASD? That is our after-school time we’re wasting, not being in ISS or OSS and missing classes all day.
Or what about threatening our parking privileges? An effective punishment could be that once students have a certain number of unexcused tardies, their parking privileges are taken away. Another idea would be to revert back to the idea of when tardies counted toward exam exemption, which Principal Chris Blice said will take effect next year. If you get two tardies, that counts as an absence toward your exam exemption. If you get four, that counts as two absences. Or, what about rewarding the students who aren’t tardy? It would be an incentive to come to school on time if the administration said that if you didn’t have any tardies, you could miss one extra day of school for your exam exemption.
All I’m saying is that by forcing students to ISS and OSS for being late to class for six days or more is ridiculous. There are other punishments that would be much more effective; the current punishments just cause more work for the administration, the teacher and the student.
–Madison Roberts