Yara Nimer

Senior Jack Horne signs in late. This year, three tardies result in a 30-minute, after-school detention.

Imagine this: A student forgets to reset their alarm clock on the Daylight Savings switch, causing him to show up 20 minutes late to Chem Honors. Or maybe he left ten minutes late and just couldn’t beat the bell.  Or maybe he found himself stuck in a long bathroom line on the way from Marine Science to World History. 

For any or all of these reasons, the student picks up a tardy, and rinse-and-repeat two more times and boom— he is sentenced to serve a 30-minute detention on Wednesday afternoon, a result of the new Tardy Policy.

The new Tardy Policy is straight-forward: if you get three non-excused tardies, you get a detention, a change that was introduced due to past years seeing way too many tardies and absences than were acceptable.  

And the purpose is clear: the policy was created to discourage students from coming to school late— whether that be sleeping in or stopping for coffee or flat out ignoring punctuality— which had, in previous years, become a problem.  So the fact is, a change in policy was needed, but upon scrutiny, it does go too far.   

Upper School Director Mrs. Conn explained that punctuality is crucial for the learning environment.

“When students are late to class, they miss out on the discussions they have in class, the questions they have,” Conn said.

The director added that there are exceptions to the tardy and absence policy, where “if a student is sick, we absolutely will not penalize them. 

Mrs. Conn explained that bus-riders and others with after-school responsibilities also need not worry— any detention received will get a week’s notice beforehand to allow plenty of time for changing plans.

But many on campus feel the policy goes too far.  

Senior Brady Winters thought that the rules don’t allow enough space for leniency where it is deserved.  

“I think it [the policy] is a good improvement, however I think they should be more lenient” in regard to enforcement.  

Winters added that the policy was enforced at the very beginning of the year, when students were still acclimating to the new policy and should have been given leeway.  

The administration did ask for teachers to show leniency in the first week or so, but Winters wasn’t convinced that went far enough.  

One component that could be reworked is the number of tardies allowed per interim, that earn a student detention.  Three tardies can happen in a day or two, with enough bad luck, and an otherwise-good student would have a detention mark on their record. Increasing the number to five could ease this issue.  

And the punishments after the detention only continue to escalate; the fourth offense triggers a Parent-Administrator meeting, and the fifth offense and forward are left to the discretion of the admin. These are unnecessary and quickly-occurring consequences for a common problem that could be fixed in other ways.

Another issue with the rapid escalation of the policy, leading to a detention, is that it can disrupts a student and even family’s schedule. Even with the week’s notice before the detention, it can still strain a tight schedule or force plan alterations.  Consider a student who takes the bus, to Sarasota.  Due to a detention, they’d be forced to wait for the late bus, getting home at nearly 6pm after a half-hour detention.  

To help curb unnecessary or excessive tardies, a ‘cushion time’ of 1–2 minutes should be implemented to allow students those few extra seconds to make it to class. Even further, there could even be a consideration to raise the time between classes from 5 minutes to 7 minutes, allowing students more time to breathe between academic periods.

In this end, the policy makes sense in theory, but in practice, a little bit of reworking could go a long way. Right now, it has the grace of being brand new and still being integrated, so a good time for mending the issues would be 2nd semester.