As soon as you swing open the doors to the high school, you immediately make a beeline towards your friends, talking and laughing in the STEM wing. As time goes on, you become fully immersed in the conversation, not noticing the crowds of students heading off to class. Suddenly, the wing is empty. Heart racing, you quickly stand from the table and fly up the stairs. When you finally reach your class, you slump into your seat and glance at the clock. Phew, only five minutes late.
The tardy policy was changed by the student council for the 2024-25 school year. Before the change, a student received a “tardy/absent”on Aspen if they arrived 20 or more minutes late to class. The revised rule in the Handbook now states that students will receive an “excessive tardy” if they are “late to class more than 15 percent of the total minutes of the class, rounded up to the next whole number.” For a 55-minute class, one will obtain an “excessive tardy” after missing nine or more minutes.
Lisa Redding, Associate Dean and co-writer of the new bill, said the change will guarantee that the tardy policy stays proportional despite potential schedule changes.
“We had 30-minute classes during COVID. We’ve had 70 and 75-minute classes. And consistently the handbook has said 20 minutes late, which is really silly in a 30-minute class, right? So it was not consistent with our attendance policy, which is, you have to be in class 85 percent of the time or you ‘N’ out,” Redding said. “So, we’re like, ‘why don’t we just make the tardy policy—the extreme tardy—the same [as the attendance policy]?’”
Many students found loopholes in the old rule that have now been fixed, according to Redding. She also said that the shorter limits for the “excessive tardy” defined in the new bill will incentivize students to get to class earlier.
“I know from talking to students that some students would just wait to go to class, 18, 19 minutes because then they’re just tardy, not super tardy which counts as an absence,” Redding said. “And they’re not learning. The goal here is to really get students in class to learn because they’re missing out on their education.”
According to junior Fen Carlson, one issue that could arise from the shortening of the grace period is that students will be unnecessarily penalized for being late to their first class of the day for reasons they should not be blamed.
“It just ends up costing the student more time outside of school. If you have to talk to the dean once or twice a week because you have something wrong with your car or it’s a long route to school or there’s traffic, you can’t control that,” Carlson said. “And to have to then spend time that you could be using to catch up on your classes if you happen to be tardy, talking with adults and being punished for it, it just doesn’t feel fair.”
Legislature member and junior Eric Bardon said this problem was brought up in discussions surrounding the new bill but that he did not think it would impact many students.
“While that was a concern, because it’s pretty easy to be 10 minutes late due to extenuating circumstances, we found that teachers and deans were usually pretty accommodating. For example, if there was a known outage of the Green Line, you could talk to your teachers and deans and make up the tardy or they wouldn’t mark it,” Bardon said.
The stricter tardy policy also includes an avenue for increased learning to reverse the absence into a regular tardy, which encourages students to understand the material they might have missed, Redding said.
“Many students don’t know—and actually, I think a lot of teachers don’t know either—that you can make up that time,” Redding said. “So if you are extremely late, you can actually make up that time with your teacher and it can get changed from an absence to a tardy. And that again encourages the students who have missed that time to be with their teacher to learn the curriculum that they missed because that’s what it’s all about. That’s really the motivation behind the bill: to make sure our kids are in class so they can learn.”
