I’m sorry, WhyNot, but your letter was entirely too polite and well thought out to effectively communicate with PTA moms. You need exclamation points and bible verses and a quick reference to the holocaust, bare minimum.
Anyway, my school didn’t allow backpacks, and we had five mintues, and it was just about the right amount of time. There was time to chat up for a little bit, get to class and get everything out and prepared before class started.
I thought that too. It is too rational to make an impact. You need rants, threats, refernces to inbreeding in prior generations (um, of the principal’s familty, not yours :)), etc.
Damn. Does this mean that you doubt my commitment to Sparkle Motion? 
What exactly are “Hall Passes”? From what I gather, they’re basically a permit to be out of class, right?
We never had those at high school- if you were out of class, everyone just assumed you had a good reason for it- and this was in a school with around 1200 students.
Then again, we didn’t have lockers, either- there physically weren’t any in the school. We had to carry all our books etc in our backpacks. People now say “Oh, the horror!” but they weren’t that heavy, and it taught us valuable things about “planning ahead” (ie, working out which classes you had on a particular day and what books you’d need).
As an unexpected bonus, the ability to carry heavy packs is extremely useful for hunting, camping, and international travel, too!
Did you ever have any kids who would actually go right ahead and do exactlty that ?
Why yes mr silenus , see here nappie made his biggest mistake…
Declan
When Hippy Hollow uses Plano East as an example you have to realize that it isn’t a full high school. It is a senior high school containing only the 11th and 12th grade, unless they changed it since I went there, and when I was there in '94 there were about 1,800 juniors and seniors.
Marc
I went to Plano from 87 to 89. I was told there were 1300 just in my graduating class, and Wikipedia’s enrollment figure of 2576 seems to bear that out. I assume PESH is similar.
Having been to both single-building and multi-building schools, I can say that each has challenges. In single-building schools, you have to negotiate stairs and floor-to-ceiling people. In multi-building campuses, the distances between classes are greater, and you may have to contend with weather.
I still think WhyNot’s PTA is guilty of wishful thinking.
Robin
Hey, sorry I was away for the weekend. Still no reply from the school.
It’s three minutes between each period. There is no morning break. Lunch is its own period - split in half for eating time and recess time. There are several possible lunch periods, and students are fit into them as the rest of their schedule permits, so some are eating at 10:30 and others not until 1:00.
That’s how all my schools did it too, in fact. I guess we have small lunchrooms around here or something - there’s no way the whole student body would fit anywhere for a morning or lunch break all together.
We couldn’t use bookbags in junior high either. But we had I think 4 or 5 minutes to get to class. School was shaped sort of like an H, two floors. 1000 kids maybe. I don’t remember kids being late as a problem. We had “teams” in junior high, so they’d group up the grades in five teams, and you had your four “core” classes with the same 4 teachers both years, and their classrooms were usually close to each other. It was hard to be late for gym because you had to dress out anyway, so if you could change quick you’d be fine. And until Columbine we were allowed to leave class to pee or whatever.
In high school we had 5 or 6 minutes again, but it was a huge school. Bookbags were allowed. You were usually only late if you spent too much time talking in the hallway and not walking. You never got locked out of class or anything. Teachers would usually hang out by their doors until class started and tell the kids to get moving. I only had issues freshman year when my locker was on one end of our close to a quarter mile long main hallway, and all but my last class were far away. But I never remember anyone getting in real trouble for being a minute late, as long as you weren’t purposively disruptive upon entering. Most teachers would let you go to the bathroom, there was one in every hallway so you never had to go far. Only if you were hanging out in the hallway in the middle of class would a principal give you shit unless you had a good excuse (yay for being on yearbook staff!). But they seemed to understand that being a minute late was fine if you weren’t a little shit disturber and doing it on purpose.
Three minutes is ridiculous in any school that requires lockers. Those things can be a bitch sometimes. And suspension is for things like fighting, drugs, etc. not being 30 seconds late to math because you had to pee or grab your homework from you locker. Kids should understand the importance of being on time, but the schools should realize maybe their passing time is not reasonable.
In a typical American high school, most classes are five days a week. A few of them are only 1, 2, or 3 days a week, with study halls in the unused periods, but those tend to be classes which don’t have heavy books, anyway (typing/computer classes, science labs immediately before or after the lecture period, etc.). So basically, every day you need all of your books.
In the only bit of administrative stupidity which managed to make it to my high school (I was very lucky), students weren’t allowed to carry bags, “and I’m sure you all know why”. Actually, we didn’t: There was really no worry at all about students carrying weapons. We did, though, have enough time between classes to usually stop at our lockers (depending on the specific classes, but some you just carried two classes worth of books).
One student did once get a detention for walking too slowly in the halls (he was going from one classroom to another right next door), but that was an idiotic teacher, not idiotic administration.
We had four minutes between classes, and we could carry our bags with us in high school. There were only about 400 students total grades 5-12, but the campus was surprisingly big. Most of our HS classes were centered in the same building, but some would be in the middle school building or the theatre.
Now they apparently have three minutes and can’t use their bags. I’m sure the biggest argument was the ‘these bags are too heavy for our children’ crap, but when I was a junior, our English teacher who was pure evil tripped over one of the bags sitting next to a locker outside her door. She was hellish enough to complain.
-Lil
I’ve heard of things like that, but never seen it. Isn’t it kind of a pain to have to eat at 10.30 or 1.00? That doesn’t sound like much fun.
We always had our lunch breaks all at once, but the thing is, we wouldn’t fit in the cafeteria either. We nearly all ate outside; on rainy days you might squish into the cafeteria, but you might just sit in the hall under a roof. It just doesn’t rain that much, and so no one ever plans for it, and they’re all suprised when it does rain and the streets flood, even though it happens every single year.
No morning break? Lunch at 10:30? Yuck! What a horrible schedule. So some (most?) of the kids must have one point in the day where they have classes for four hours without stopping. Don’t they go completely crazy at that point? I can’t imagine concentrating from 9 till 1 without stopping when I was 13 or so (I don’t really know what a “middle school” covers but I assume it’s around that ballpark)
I dealt with this ridiculousness at my high school. Our administration had the gall to claim that they had timed a walk and determined that four minutes was enough time to get to the next class, with a restroom break and a stop at a locker. I watched them do this, and there were three major things wrong with their method:
1.) The restroom the administrator stopped at wasn’t accessable to students. In fact, students had access to only one restroom at the far north end of the campus unless they were taking a class in a room with its own facilities, such as the gym. The rest stayed locked.
2.) The walk was simply from one end of the campus to the other, without any doubling back. This fails to represent those situations where you’re moving from one class to another diagonally across the campus, but the geniuses that assign lockers have put yours on the other side of the moon, forcing you to walk a giant right angle or something equally bizarre.
3.) They timed it during class, when there weren’t hundreds of other students to force a path through.
Eventually the teachers just stopped caring; they knew it was impossible and didn’t enforce the policy. A couple of administrators would walk the halls after the bell rang and pick up a few late people now and then, but I was never unlucky enough to find out what they did with those students.
I remember our Cafeteria wasn’t very big, so we were allowed to eat in the hallways. Only on lower and main floors though, if you were caught eating on the upper floor… well I don’t know what happened, but it wasn’t allowed heh. In the warm weather most everyone would lounge on the front lawn and eat outside.
3 minutes between classes! I can’t imagine. Our schedule we had about 8 minutes between classes. The first year was pretty hectic how it was set up, but the next they changed the schedule so each class was longer and we had fewer classes on each day. We had our lockers and our bags to carry them but people would go to their lockers so they didn’t need to have as many books at once. I’d usually carry my morning books, then switch at lunch (which was 45 minutes iirc, and 20 on Friday so we could get out early).
We had 2400 students at my high school.
Please tell me you didn’t eat the “Mystery Meat”.
Once you stir it into the Grade D beef hearts it ain’t so bad.
We had three minutes between classes too, but you have to imagine a two-story building just large enough to accommodate 500 students. Most kids took books for two classes at a time, which cut down on locker visits, and bathroom passes were easy to get from most teachers who appriciated that you made the effort to show up on time for attendance. The fact that the kids in the OP’s school aren’t allowed to bring books for 2 classes is bizarre and unrealistic.
WhyNot, if you can get the principal to try to make the walk from class to locker to class, please have him do it during an actual passing period, when the halls are jam-packed with kids all trying to do the same. At my high school, the major danger of being late was posed by being literally unable to force your way through the intersections of hallways.
I repeat: an actual passing period. That’s important.
Our school had around 1000 students, we were given around 5 minutes between lessons. There were no lockers at all though, so you had to carry everything around with you, those were bloody heavy bags! There was no start-of-the-lesson bell, just an end-of one, so it was up to the teachers discretion when to start the class. I don’t recall anyone ever getting anything worse than a cold look. It wasn’t really a problem.
The year I left, they introduced a new rule. If you were late to morning registration a certain number of times then your parents would be contacted. Keep it up and they’ll take it further and your parents shoulder the blame.
I know some parents have been fined and there has even been talk of jail time, however I think that is reserved for severe truancy problems.