ROHS administration has updated the school’s tardy policy, assigning lunch detentions to students who are frequently late to first hour. The change came after records showed that over 200 students came in late for first hour in the month of September.
“Since COVID, we’ve been very lax on 1st hour tardies. But now it’s getting to the point where it’s ridiculous. If you stand at the front window at 8:00, there’s a line of kids,” said assistant principal Caroline Krynak.
In the past few years, the tardy policy involved assigning a lunch detention for every three tardies, but first hour tardies did not count toward the detention. The policy now includes first hour tardies, and students are assigned a lunch detention for every five tardies.
The change poses a problem for students who are more likely to be late to school. Some students have to navigate poor road conditions, construction, and traffic. Others have to drive siblings
to school, or don’t have a driver’s license to drive themselves, so they depend on others for transportation.
“When I’m at my dad’s house, I live an hour away. There are a lot of days where I’m late because of accidents on the highway. I can’t control that,” said junior Lucy VanHaerents.
Students who have extenuating circumstances are encouraged to contact the assistant principal assigned to their last name. After a conference, the administration may offer excusals to students with extenuating circumstances and can fix errors in the attendance system if a student is wrongly marked tardy. The change in policy has also encouraged teachers to mark students tardy. In past school years, teachers were required to fill out paperwork for every tardy, but they were more concerned with following through on academic tasks like instruction, grading, planning, and curriculum development. Now that administration is handling the paperwork required for tardies, all the teachers have to do is mark the student as tardy when recording attendance.
“This takes a huge load off for teachers. We feel like we can mark tardies now that we’re not the ones doing the paperwork.” said teacher Lindsay Cole.
With this new policy in effect, both teachers and administration are hopeful that more students will get to class on time.
