Staff Photo by David Fosman

Students toil in line awaiting their fate.

The average high schooler encounters many problems throughout their day, but none as awful as the ever-looming tardy.  

Designed as a “Behavior Tracker,” the Hero pass system is in its infancy. The two-year-old tardy system was implemented for the 2015-2016 school year, but wasn’t used last year. With its purpose being to document behavioral incidents among students, the idea seems sound, but the Hero pass hasn’t been met with open arms.  

Here’s the problem: when a student arrives late to their classes, the teacher then sends the student to the office to get a pass. The student is logged into the Hero Pass system and receives a printed slip stating the reason for the tardy.

The new system is pretty counterproductive, not to mention the printers and online database are extremely expensive. Sending students to the office only takes up more class time. By the time the student gets back to class, he or she would have already missed close to 10 minutes of class.

The Hero pass system needs an upgrade, or how we deal with tardiness in general needs an upgrade.  

I propose that if we keep the Hero Pass system there should be a printer in each classroom or pod, so that students don’t have to miss class time to go down to the office. Otherwise let’s just ditch the printers and keep an online archive of these ¨incidents.”

But do we really need to keep track of tardiness? In life we are late for things and are expected to deal with the awkwardness of arriving late, which is a punishment in itself. Walking into class while our teacher is knee-deep in a presentation, and then causing people turn around and look like you just killed someone, is its own social repercussion.

Also, many universities don’t enforce tardiness; in fact, you don’t technically even have to go to class, so the pressure is on the students to maintain their academic performance. Public high schools are government-funded, so that’s where things get tricky. It varies state-to-state on what is constituted as an “instructional day” (the minimum amount of time students have to be in school), so California public schools might actually get away with ditching their tardiness policy, where schools in Tennessee for example require a more strict schedule.

Being tardy isn’t a good thing, but being punished for one is a double negative. Since students are already missing precious class-time, maybe tardies should be eliminated after middle school. High schools rave about how they are preparing their students for college and the “real-world,” so they need to let them make “real-world” decisions.