Even the best  students are late sometimes, and when that happens, they always get marked tardy. It doesn’t matter if you were late due to your parents, traffic, or anything else. As soon as the bell rings, you have to be sitting in your seat to not be considered tardy, and too many of these could easily result in a detention. I don’t think this is fair. I think that teachers should not be able to give a student tardiness for a reason they cannot not control. 

To start off, tardies are very common. So many students get tardy everyday, especially while getting to school. Most of the time students are late to class due circumstances that aren’t their own. Whether it is because of traffic, their parents, or personal problems, most of the time, students don’t choose to be late. According to freshman Eashan Wahi: “[e]verytime that I am late, it is always due to unfortunate coincidences. This one time, I was late to the first period because it was raining, and my parents and I did not realize that that would cause traffic to be bigger and it would take more time to get to school than any other day. We left the house and were greeted by some terrible traffic, and I was tardy”. How would you have known about the weather and the traffic? You can’t control anything about this situation, but still it ends up penalizing you– even worse, if it was your third time, it could result in a detention. I think that it’s just an unjust and harsh policy that should be tweaked to make it more fair and reasonable. 

In order to have a good late system and policy, students should only be marked as tardy for a reason that they could . Any other incidents of being late should be excused. According to Wilcox High School student Zenit Nazarovich,, if the tardy policy could change, “it should reflect the reason you were late;in other words, it should be the same as absences, and if excused it should not go on your record”. I think this is a good idea. It would get rid of the unfortunate situations where you cannot predict the time you get to school, but it also makes sure that students at least try to get to class on time. If this new policy were to be implemented, tardies would be a lot less common. However, there is also the fact that students could lie about the reason why they are absent, and senior at Wilcox High School Diane Shih contributes her solution to this problem: it would be a good idea to “have a parent opt you out of getting detention due to being late. Meaning, I could have my dad sign a paper or form explaining that I shouldn’t get detention since my tardy was due to uncontrollable circumstances that I could not have done anything about ” . If these were the policies instead of the one we have currently, it would be a lot more fair and reasonable. Tardies could be dealt with a lot easier and the ways that were quoted by students are a good example of what tardy policies should be. 

In conclusion, the tardy policy should be changed because most of the time it can be unfair and harsh. Students can be late to class due to an uncontrollable reason but still be marked as late and suffer consequences. The tardy policy could be changed a bit to make it more fair. Hopefully, the tardy policy will be changed eventually, but till then, get to class!