Tardies

Wednesday, May 3, 1995

Tardies are on the rise and the front office has shut down. Of course, they shut down months ago (but I’ve been running a petty little guerrilla war of my own for the last five months).

At the beginning of the school year, the administration took a hard-line stance on tardies. If students were tardy, send them down to the office, the staff was told, and the office could give’em detention or a Saturday Work. I remember applauding that announcement with many of my peers at the opening-of-school staff meeting at the end of August. And for the first two terms, it worked wonderfully for me. Between my own management of tardies within the confines of classroom 29 and the beefed-up administrative presence (tardy sweeps and the detentions), my tardies were cut to very nearly nothing (even in the typical problem periods--first and fourth, following non-class open times).

But nothing gold can last. By the last faculty meeting of the calendar year, just two days before going off to winter break, Dumber pronounced the office policy a failure. Why? Because there were too many students receiving detentions and not serving them, then receiving Saturday Works and not serving them. And the office didn’t know what to do. My class had almost no tardies because of the program (regardless of the lack of any lame follow-up from the administration). But since the office couldn’t handle the numbers, the program was deemed a failure. Thus, it was put to a stop.

It didn’t stop me, however, from continuing to send tardy students to the office to receive unexcused tardy readmission slips (readmits). This allowed me to take roll relatively unflustered before the tardies began to trickle (in January) then stream (in May) in. Of course, without any sort of administrative policy or stance, student tardies have gone up, especially in typically non-problematic second period (there is really no excuse for a student to be late second period, since every student is already on campus).

Today, however, a new edict was handed down. Stop sending tardy students to the office for readmits. It seems the office staff can’t even handle this. So now, I need to come up with a personal tardy follow-up plan, on top of the school-wide tardy referrals (with parent notification at four, office notification at six [at which the student is supposed to attend Saturday work--though last week only FOUR students showed up], and possible lowering of the student’s grade at ten [like a student who has been tardy ten times is the type of student who would do enough work to pass a class]). Here’s the plan... For every minute (or fraction thereof) that a student is tardy, the student owes me detention for that amount of time at lunch. No detention? then a referral goes in. For? Saturday work, I think.

Oh, well... I’m trying to keep my end up.

I’m still making parent phone calls, for instance. Yesterday, I spent some time trying to track down non-attending students. I phoned one mother at her worksite. I was told I couldn’t talk to her; she had lost her phone privileges. I left a message. Of course, this provoked a little thought: If the mother has lost phone privileges at work, then how much responsibility can she be teaching her daughter. The answer? the student did not show up for class today, either.

Like I said: oh, well...