The school tardy policy is a broken policy that causes students to be later than they actually have to be by forcing them to go through the entire school simply to tell the attendance office they were late to their class. Others find that even if they are in the classroom, if they aren’t seated they are tardy after official policy (though the policy may not be enforced). Many teachers do not enforce the policy as it should be, letting it slide at their own discretion, but the policy should be changed as there are always teachers who enforce the rules one-to-one. Also, a student who is tardy should not be sent back to the attendance office as it makes the student more late for class and at the same time creates more hassle for the entire system. Rather the teacher of the class should just electronically enter the student as tardy when they come to class and just continue the class with a short interruption rather than a long tedious one when a student arrives ten minutes late rather than twenty seconds.
The tardy policy hasn’t always been as harsh as it is now having changed from a much more lax form where it was up to the teacher’s discretion on what was to be considered tardy to the system that we have now. The tardy policy was changed to include the “tardy sweeps” as some teachers were enforcing the tardy policy and others were not causing some teachers to go into other teacher’s rooms questioning the teacher’s enforcement of the tardy policy. Rather than having a system of letting the teachers decide, the school adopted a system where all teachers were forced to report tardies and other teachers were set in place to police the other teachers and catch the students who are tardy.
Some simple ideas to change the official tardy policy would be that the teachers who are teaching the class are given some leeway to allow students into the room after the bell rings. Also students who have legitimate excuses such as a stuck locker should be left to the teacher rather than just have the student get a tardy for their class. In essence, tardies should be left up to a teacher whose class a student is late for rather than a policy which does not view a situation on a case by case basis. What I do agree with, though, is that the different tardies should be filed away with a note from the teacher so that if a students is abusing the system, there can be punishment which can be applied, though this would also be on a case by case basis.