Are kids being late to class really that much of an issue?
Hell, yes! Tardies are a major problem at most secondary schools I know of. Is it a problem that can be easily dealt with by the classroom teachers? Certainly. But that gives you a not-uniform response, and that is anathema to administrators.
My school has a lock-out policy that I generally ignore. I want the kid in my class, not at On Campus Suspension. Believe me, if someone is habitually tardy, I can deal with it much more effectively than the administration can. (Brian, since you obviously know the material so well that you could skip the first part of the lecture, why don’t you come up to the board and diagram the battle of Waterloo for us?)
I think it’s perfect.
It amazes me that the school thinks that kids can use the bathroom, get their books, and get to another part of the building in three minutes. We had four minutes between classes in junior high, and we were forbidden to go to our lockers between classes. Someone at your son’s school didn’t think this policy through.
Yes, that was the rule when I was at school too.
Well, it’s disruptive when you have maybe five different kids all sauntering in 5-10 minutes late, each disrupting the start of class. If each class is about 50 minutes, then you’re losing up to 20% of class time to these disruptions.
A minute or two was never a big deal when I was in school, though.
If you really want to make a difference, I suggest you make an appointment to speak with the principal. Bring along a few books, a padlock, a stopwatch, and a map of where your kid’s classes are. Your son can help you plot the route of the longest walk he has to take daily.
Invite the principal to walk the walk. Stop – hopefully there is an empty locker you can root around in a bit to simulate changing books, but at least you can take the time to open and close a combination lock – hit the bathroom, and go on at what an adult would consider a reasonable pace.
Time it – discuss the results.
There’s a fair chance the principal would refuse to go along with this, but you’ll be in a pretty strong position to call him/her a total dipshit at the next PTA meeting.
Well, yeah. It means that your instructional period gets shortened, because kids coming in late is a distraction, you have to re-explain stuff you already discussed, etc. If kids can’t take a dump or pee between classes then they need to go during class, and you have the privilege of administering those activities.
It’s likely a problem at this school because kids have 3 minutes between classes.
One of the most dreaded responsibilities of an administrator is coordinating the master schedule. Everything in the school rotates around this - when the buses arrive, when teachers take lunch duty, etc. etc. It is disastrously difficult.
However, in a building the size that WhyNot is describing, it’s a recipe for disaster. It means you have to end the period a little early, so the kids can be dismissed right at the bell. It also means that kids are probably running in the halls and stuff they’re not supposed to because of this.
The bag rule is asinine. If they’re so fearful of what’s in a bag, why can’t kids have transparent bags? I know a lot of schools have that rule. It’s not like School Shooter Kid can’t tuck a gun in his/her waistband or in a pocket. And if you’re that worried, apply for a grant to get metal detectors installed.
Seems to me that they could solve this by adding time between some of the periods (locker visit breaks) and keeping it the same at others (go straight to class breaks).
I think WhyNot might want to come to school one day and follow one of the kid’s routes and see if it can be done in three minutes. (Probably not, but there’s nothing like an experiment.) You can do it before or after school… just add some time to negotiate other kids in the hall.
On the other hand, too much time between classes is often the root of trouble (fights, assaults, etc.). I can see where they’re coming from but this solution seems to be more trouble than it’s worth.
Oh, yeah, that “heavy bag is unhealthy for the students” crap is making the news around here too. How unhealthy is it to run at full speed down a crowded hall so as not to be late. A teacher friend of mine got her jaw broken in such a collision, though the little dipshit wasn’t running because he was late to class.
Good idea. Draft 2, changes bolded:
I’m assuming “Tardy” is American Education Buzzspeak for “Late”, right? It sounds like something Dr. Who would nickname his travelling Phone Box.
(Yes, I know what “Tardy” means, I’ve just never heard the word used outside the context of US High Schools… I’ve often wondered why, incidentally.)
Personally, I’d be glad that the kids showed up to class at all, but schools in NZ were and are vastly different to ones in the US (I never recall punctuality being an issue when I was in high school, FWIW).
Either way, it’s a reasonable health concern.
Yes, it is when they are fornicating without a hall pass.
It’s also a problem with the teachers choose the goal of reducing tardies rather than teaching creative thinking.
Both of these problems actually occured in the school where I taught. Today a student at that school took a rifle via city bus to school. The people on the bus were upset. Not a word from the school!
Oh, absolutely. I was giving someone the “backpack safety” lecture just yesterday in another thread. It’s just interesting to me that there are two stories floating around. Whichever is true, it could be solved by allowing small, clear handbags instead of large opaque backpacks.
At my school, if I remember correctly we had 10 minutes between periods, carrying bags or not was totally at our own discretion, and lateness was never a problem…but then we had 100 students from ages 11-18 (not sure what grades that translates to) and my teachers were liable to be down the pub drinking with my dad in the evenings - a pretty big incentive to be on time 
The short answer, yes.
The longer answer: Upper level classes may be fine if a kid or two walks in a minute or two late. However, the lower level classes, which tend to be populated by those who are habitually late to class, are sent into a state of crazy whenever anything of any sort of interest happens (someone talks in the hall, a fellow student passes gas, a person walks into the room, etc.). If these distractions could be minimized, these kids would have more time to focus. In short, lateness doesn’t just impact the kid that’s late.
…
My own schools, not being an American schools, were of the kind where most of your classes happened in the same room. We didn’t have lockers: our impossible-to-lock desks in “our” classroom were where we were supposed to keep our stuff. For the classes that took place in another room, we only took the items for that specific class. On days when we had PhysEd, the bags with the gym clothes would be placed on a pile at the back of the classroom during the regular classes.
From grades 6-11 we were in the 2nd floor; there was a lift but the only student who used it was wheelchair-bound. Not even the teachers would use it unless they were carting something around. For grade 12, we were in the 3rd floor of a building with no lift, the wheelchair-bound classmate would be brought up and down by several classmates every time.
Bathrooms were always in the ground floor.
We had 15’ between 1st and 2nd, 30’ (“rec time”) between 2nd and 3rd, 5’ between any other pair of hours. We made classes on time, but if we’d had to dash someplace, remember the damn combination, change all the books, dash to the bathroom (and the OP’s kid is a guy!) and find the next class? Yeah, rite :rolleyes:
ISTR US high schools are much bigger than ours (well, oz ones anyway, don’t know nuffin’ about NZ) - a couple of thousand seems to be not unusual (someone help me out here if I’m wrong). Clearly this would make getting places on time more of an issue there.
I don’t recall it being an issue when I was at school either - or having any particular policy about locker visits. It was just “get yourself organized whatever way works”
Heh-heh…she said “cock”…heh-heh.
Rock on. You’ll share the response in its entirety, I trust? I really don’t see how they can argue with any of your points (though I think the possibility of wetting their pants is pretty slim. Any kid would take a tardy/suspension over pissing his or herself and fight the battle afterward. I prolly would have left that out.).
Ask your son if any of his friends’ parents objected. I’d imagine all email boxes are overflowing over there.
A couple of thousand would be a massive high school, like Plano East or Skyline in Dallas. I went to a moderately sized high school, with a population of about 1400. (Any given day about a quarter were skipping school, though.)
It really depends region to region I’d say, but smaller schools are all the rage nowadays. So even in a large school (say 2000) there might be three or four academies within which are more or less their own schools in the building.
WhyNot’s situation is in a middle school, which I would expect is much smaller. I don’t think there were middle schools with more than 1000 kids in my hometown of Austin, Texas, and here in New England, they’re likely smaller.
My school used to do that under the hilarious name “tardy round up”. If caught we’d have to do Saturday school- four hours of writing essays about sports on Saturday morning.
I learned pretty quickly that if I heard that bell and I wasn’t in class, it was better to get the heck off campus. More than once I head that bell while walking to school and turned right around back home.