By Johnathon Shaffer / Sports editor and Naomi Amazie / Feature editor
The parking lot for students and teachers continues to be a growing concern for parents, teachers, students, staff and many more that are involved with it. The parking lot isn’t easily accessible for anyone and creates congestion on both the inside and the outside of the lot.
Even when I find myself inside the lot at the right time I often find myself caught in traffic by the senior parking lot, and even at the front of the line by the superintendent’s office.
This is extremely frustrating considering the fact that two of the three entrances are unusable for most students. One of those entrances allows for buses to let students off; the other is blocked by police in the morning.
Being unable to park in front of the natatorium makes it impossible for that entrance to work for students that drive to school. Leaving only one entrance, which battles with being only a one lane road as well as the wait for cross traffic, makes it very tricky to get to the school.
For me, the school is nine minutes away from my house, but on a school morning it takes me 17 minutes on average. That’s close to double the average amount, not factoring in the time it takes for me to walk into the school. When considering that, it fully doubles the amount of time it normally takes me to get to school.
When a student is slightly late, they normally find themselves in a huge line that takes about 5 minutes to get through, depending on how far back you find yourself. If the point is for the student to be in class, it feels counterintuitive to have students miss even more class to mark themselves as tardy.
With this, there are issues with the discipline for the tardies. The handbook states that three tardies constitutes a detention. Three infractions also means detention. Why is the school equating tardies that are one minute late, with students intentionally disrupting class over a longer period of time?
It can be especially exasperated when students have extenuating circumstances that restrict their ability to come to school, on top of the existing issues with the school’s line. Seniors Alyssa and Luke Appleby attempt to get to school early everyday, due to Luke needing crutches for an injury he suffered.
“Luke was on crutches, and it was his first day that he went to one crutch, so he was obviously moving really slow. Then we pulled into the school, and there was traffic all the way down Gem Road, and down the road that goes towards our parking lot, was filled up with parents, who were going in there now late, because they don’t want to drop their kids off late, but then I couldn’t go around them and get to my parking spot. So we finally got to our spot, and we were walking in as fast as we could. It was around 7:32, and they had already locked the doors, and we had to walk through it. We were in the line, and I was kind of just saying to myself, ‘Well, this isn’t our fault. We’re obviously not that late, and we obviously didn’t do anything to make us late.’ So I walked to the front of the office and said, ‘Hey, he just switched to one crutch. Is there any way you can let us go through?’ Because, obviously, we would have been here on time if he wasn’t. The office lady said, ‘Well, let’s just, just go ahead and get in line and sign in, and then I’ll see what I can do about it.’, and I was like, ‘Okay’. So we had to get back into our spot in line; thankfully someone gave up their spot. Then we had to wait through the whole line, and we finally logged in, and they still counted us tardy and late, and they never changed it. Instead of just having a teacher count us tardy, and we would be four minutes late to class, we were 10 minutes late to class because we had to wait in the line.”
Having the teachers mark students tardy would be a much smoother and more efficient process for both the students and the teachers that already have to take attendance every class period.
A more complex, but widespread solution would be a tardy policy reform to be more nuanced for the students, to do a tiered severity system based on how late for class you are. Tardies are already recorded through google forms, so it would not be difficult at all to keep a track of a log of what time a student comes in.
