It’s the first year of tardy lockouts being implemented at Silverado, and the Silverado Star staff does not believe that this is an effective way of cracking down on students getting to class on time.

We believe a plethora of issues are worsened, rather than relieved, with this new policy. Like any high school, Silverado has struggled with tardies and even vandalism for years, but being sent to Room 404 if you arrive to class even a minute after the bell is not effective and only makes matters worse.

This not only punishes the bad students who are late to almost every class but also the good students who happen to be stuck in traffic or bad weather. If they drive themselves to school, they can’t get a pass since they’re not accompanied by a parent, the only exception to being locked out.

An even more prevalent problem would be parents who need to head right to work after dropping their child off; now they might be late to work if they have stop to write a pass for their student.

Though students can access Canvas if they happen to be late and get sent to Room 404, students miss out on valuable group work, science labs and summative assessments. This is even more detrimental than being five minutes late to class would have been. Students also can’t easily ask the teacher for help. Questions would have to be responded to through email rather than quickly calling on a hand in class. Even students who are on time and present in class can no longer stay late to finish a test or ask the teacher a question because they don’t want to risk being tardy to the next class.

School administrators did make one change to the strict policy. For first period, students have a two-minute grace period to get to class since CCSD clocks are two minutes fast. But that doesn’t affect the other six classes. Some of our Star staff members have to walk from the gym all the way to the 900s hall, which is nearly impossible to do in four minutes when crowds of students are also scrambling to get to class on time.

Even when students have a pass, since the doors are locked, it’s a constant disruption that interrupts class for someone to answer the door while the teacher is mid-sentence. The threat of lockouts hasn’t really solved this problem. 

And we beg the question if the same students are in Room 404 on a day-to-day, period-to-period basis, how effective are tardy lockouts? There are undeniably a handful of students who couldn’t care less about being in class. Whether they are ignoring the lesson in class, roaming the hallways or hanging out in Room 404, they aren’t going to do their work. Tardy lockouts have no effect on these students either way. 

Other fixes to the issue would be progressive discipline, similar to the dress code policy. Students could either be written up instead of being sent to Room 404 or sign a late sheet and receive the discipline appropriate for the number of times they’ve been tardy.

As a whole, we greatly hope the administration reconsiders tardy lockouts.