Tardies Should Not Count Against Leesville Students 

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Many students at Leesville receive tardies for several reasons. The students get punished for being late, even though sometimes they can't help it. (Photo Courtesy of Public Domain)

At Leesville, penalties are given if a student is late to class. After receiving five tardies, students receive a warning from the administration. If the student continues to be late, they earn lunch detention. If students continue to be late after serving the lunch detention, greater punishments will be given, such as ISS. 

It is unrealistic that a student will only be late five days out of the whole semester for a reason other than an appointment or illness. 

Tardies should not have negative effects on students. Students should be on time and responsible, but it is not practical to always be on time. 

Tardies can be excused only for a few reasons, such as sickness, appointments, or more serious issues like problems revolving around health. 

Other reasons, such as morning traffic, oversleeping, or walking far from class to class are not excusable reasons for being late, but they should be. These reasons are why most students are late to class. 

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“Yesterday I was a minute late to class because people were walking slowly”, and I was still counted tardy which was very frustrating,” said Riley Hawkins, sophomore. 

Students are not perfect; teenagers often sleep through their alarms, but this is a valid excuse to be late. 

Students wake up early for school, attend clubs or sports, go to work, and come home to study and do homework. They are then expected to wake up early and be on time for class every day, which is not realistic.

Students become exhausted and oversleep, causing them to be late. After a few instances of this happening, they are given lunch detention, which is not right. 

If a student is over 30 minutes late, a tardy is deserved but a matter of minutes should not cause a student to get a tardy every time. 

The student could have been late from traffic or simply getting stopped at a red light. A tardy should not be given because of this. 

Assigning lunch detention and ISS to students who are tardy encourages students to skip class. Students don’t want to get into trouble or get detention so instead of being late, they find it better to just be absent. 

Absences don’t have as great an impact on students as tardies, so students would rather skip than attend class late. Absences are worse for students because they miss more material taught in class, however, there is a better outcome, given they won’t get assigned detention or ISS. 

Students also get taken out of class to be warned about tardies, which is a distraction. This causes them to lose class time and miss important information being taught. It can also be stressful for students because the rest of their day is spent worrying about being late for the next class and getting disciplined. 

Coming back from lunch is another reason many students are late to class. This is an acceptable reason to be late.

With lunch time shortened, students have very little time to leave campus, get lunch, and make it back on time. Some would argue that you don’t have to go off campus for lunch, but it is a short, needed break from school that students have the ability to do.

It is dangerous for students to rush back to school from lunch. This causes accidents because students speed to get back on time. Several students have also been pulled over for speeding to get to school on time. 

Instead of students getting punished for tardiness, they should learn how to better manage their time on their own without being bombarded by administrators telling them to be on time or else they’ll get in trouble. 

A better way to teach kids to manage their time is to have them learn how to come to school on time without the word of administrators constantly telling them to be on time. 

Being tardy self inflicts punishments like bad grades and missing class time, students have to learn how to get through that on their own and without faculty extensively punishing them. 

A junior at Leesville expresses that it is difficult to be on time in the mornings. She is held up by her older brother, who is a senior and not worried about getting to school on time. “Tardiness should not be held against me especially considering I’m only a couple minutes late, the school traffic is also terrible and waking up early is not an option to be on time, I need my sleep after a long day of school, sports, and work,” said anonymous. 

If students did not have to worry about being late, even by only a couple seconds, issues could be solved and students would learn how to manage time on their own. 

Tardies should still be given just not held against students and no punishments should be enforced. 

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