With a new school year comes new and improved school policies, including the newly revised tardy policy. In case you didn’t know, this policy says that if a student has four unexcused tardies to a class, then they are put in ‘not in good school standing.’ This means that the student is not allowed to do any school related extracurriculars until the bad school standing is taken away.

Even though the new policy is doing it’s job, for the most part, it is still a very strict and unfair policy. For one, the policy is completely biased towards people who do extracurricular activities. It only targets and affects the students who are staying after to do things, while the students who don’t do any extracurriculars can continue on their everyday schedule. Those are the types of students who show up late whenever they want to because the tardy policy won’t affect them at all. For the most part, the students who don’t do anything after school are the ones who need to get to class, and who the tardy policy should be aimed towards the most.

Also, this point was brought up in a leadership class conversation; when a student hits 3 tardies, he/she is going to be scared about getting the fourth. I know some students that will without a doubt just skip school that day in order to avoid that fourth tardy. Isn’t that exactly what this policy is ultimately trying to enforce? Trying to get students to class so they can learn all the material? Now with some of the harsh punishments, it may even bring less students to class, because some may very well choose to skip school.

Certain teachers should also loosen up on this policy a little bit as well. It completely depends on the teacher, but some will mark you down if you are as little as a step out the door when the bell rings. While some others are more reasonable and will give you some room to slide. Teachers need to realize that students have conversations, and get breakfast, and some even have classes that are on the other side of the building, and it is actually hard to get there on time. Don’t get me wrong, if a student walks in 10 minutes late, by all means that’s a tardy, but if a student walks in 2 seconds late, you should be able to let that slide.

In theory, the new tardy policy was an amazing idea, but actually carried out, not so much. The School Board/Administration need to realize that this policy may not actually be that bad if it wasn’t so biased towards the students actually doing after school activities. Until they can get a fair policy for everyone, we should go back to the old policy of just writing students up and having them learn that way, because that is a fair policy that everyone can abide by.