Josh Dugan
Crowded halls cause tardiness

September 27, 2000

When my parents returned from back-to-school night, the first thing they asked me was not how I was going to handle the most difficult year of high school, but how I could manage to get from class to class in the five minutes allotted in the schedule.

My answer for them: I don’t. And it seems to me that many students don’t either.

Last year, many teachers deserved credit for excusing reasonable tardiness throughout the year, on the grounds that students were still getting their feel for the new and bigger building.

This year, however, everything has changed.

The school is no longer so new, and students are now being marked late for coming to class, even seconds after the second bell. Consequently, after the first weeks of school, many students are finding their way straight to the three percent grade reduction mandated in the student handbook for students who are late to a class five times during a trimester.

The problem in this system lies in the fact that the school might not be as big or as unfamiliar to us as it was last year, but that it is quite overcrowded. For anyone who refuses to believe me, I invite you to observe the junior and senior locker areas and passageways between classes.

Trying to get through the corridor that connects the two areas is like trying to drive through Manhattan traffic at six o’clock on a weekday afternoon. Students moving in either direction to classes on either side of the building must push their way through an approximately five foot wide entrance way and maneuver past other students standing at their lockers on either side of them. It is, in a word, chaos, or perhaps even more precisely, pandemonium.

And it is not only juniors and seniors who have this problem; students who try using the hallways occupied by the seventh, eighth and ninth graders in hopes of getting to class on time will find similarly congested routes.

Because of the pressure they feel to get to class on time, students are becoming increasingly hostile to one another. In any major hallway in the school, you can see students pushing, screaming, cursing and showing complete disregard for derech eretz, in an effort to keep their grades from sliding.

Unless something is done, getting to class on time will soon become an issue of survival of the fittest, leaving younger students at a severe disadvantage. As a way to add to this lunacy, teachers continually suggest thatstudents carry their books for each class in their book bag, so as to make tripsto their lockers unnecessary.

One can only imagine what would happen if the students pushing their ways to class began following this practice and were essentially armed with a 40 pound blunt object that could accidentally be used to hurt someone when rushing to class. Not to mention the extra space it takes up in the hallway or the toll that carrying a heavy bag all day has on the growing body.

Fortunately, there are numerous temporary solutions that can be used until more permanent measures are taken to give students easier access to their classrooms. The administration can choose to add as little as thirty seconds to the time between classes or give students a grace period in which they can get to class after the bell rings without being penalized.

Perhaps an even better solution would be to get rid of the “three percent” system altogether. Mild student tardiness does not fall under the category of truancy and should not be dealt with as such.

If a student is 15 seconds late to five classes, has that student really missed three percent of the material for that trimester? It is simply illogical. That is not to say that students who are consistently tardy and show a disregard for getting to class on time should not be punished, but it does not seem right that seventh graders who are late to class because of problems opening their lockers, or any other student who is stuck in hallway traffic should fall under this category.

As we begin yet another school year, perhaps it is time for the faculty and administration to create a new system that meets the needs of students in the still relatively new building.