Staff editorial: Tardy concerns

 

There needs to be fair warning for school discipline in order to correct negative behavior in the student body.
It is understandable that the school is working out kinks in a new tardy and detention system.
Changes are bound to cause some turbulence in the daily schedule, but we can tolerate only so much.
The detention system seemed nearly nonexistent for the first semester of this year, and now the round up of the tardy students in advisory seems too little, too late, and too sudden.
Students should not be tardy on their way to class.
On the flip side, the administrators should be held responsible for making sure that students know exactly what the consequences are at the beginning of each year.
That means making sure we understand the penalties in their entirety, giving us warnings to know in advance if there are detention hours for us to serve, and delegating some sort of committee whose time will be spent making sure that all absences and tardies are recorded correctly.
Absences for students are considered more severe than tardies, but the absence system is suffering from inefficiency stemming from the attendance office, where events like the Senior Panorama picture should have had everyone marked down as present. As it was, the entire senior class was marked absent.
Teachers and counselors should not have to waste time correcting absences that should have been cleared months ago. It should be a cause for concern that this kind of clerical error is so common.
If we are to be held on the receiving end of the new and aggressive tardy policy, then our time after school will be at the mercy of the attendance office!
Hopefully, the new system will be worked out and implemented by next year so that the juniors, sophomores, and freshmen from this year will at least know what kind of penalties they have to work with before they are let off of the hook for several months at a time to only be confronted with a new system halfway through the year.

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