Sorry I just sent in attendance, you need to go down to the office; everyone’s worst nightmare. Why is it that the students of West Essex are punished for the never ending line of traffic, the crowded senior lot and long walks to classes with detentions? This school year West Essex took some liberty of granting its students a later start time, to give students something like 15 more minutes of sleep. It is blatantly necessary to wake up for school each day, show up and do your work on time; nobody is arguing that, but punishing attendance tardiness with detention lacks compassion and effectiveness. In no world is waking up at the crack of dawn thinking, gotta get up so I don’t get detention- healthy for growing teens who are already under so much stress.
“Extenuating circumstances can come in all different ways like god forbid something happened to your dog,” West Essex High School Assistant Principal Amanda Fernicola said. “Does that mean you’re not gonna get detention? No.”
Though rules exist for a reason, the enforcement of said rules also matters. The adults screaming at students for being late or to get to class, are the ones who never fail to rip that perfect one liner- when I was a kid I walked to school! Teachers and administration at West Essex seem to be more focused on our ability to walk into class at 8 on the dime rather than actually making sure we are learning during those classes and our lives at home. A solution to this could be walking into the first period 10 minutes late not contributing to a detention. Since nothing much is happening in those first few minutes of class, students wouldn’t be missing any important test material.
“We are responsible to reach out to your parents after you take the bus coming into school,” Fernicola said. “If you’re not there the first 10 minutes of class, that’s when attendance helps us to reach out to your parents.”
But the students who are getting these detentions aren’t coming off the bus. The students who are getting these detentions are the ones who are driving to school accompanied by their parents everyday in the line of traffic. When a bus is late, the tardiness doesn’t even count since it wasn’t necessarily our fault, but the never ending line of traffic is?
