Updated tardy policy discourages students from being excessively late

courtesy of Saachi Jain

Students who are over 5 minutes late are encouraged to stop at the Attendance Office for a tardy receipt. 

The district updated its tardy policy this year to distinguish tardies over 30 minutes, designed to discourage students from being excessively tardy. Excessive tardies now count as unexcused absences when calculating for disciplinary consequences such as Treasure Toga campus maintenance sessions after school. 

“We are hoping to keep track of students who consistently show up to class well past its start time,” assistant principal Kristen Cunningham said. “Every excessive tardy will be marked as an unexcused absence, discouraging students from being overly late.”

The enforcement of tardies remains mostly the same, now including excessive ones as cuts. Students who have three unexcused absences, three excessive tardies or five tardies under 30 minutes, will receive a Treasure Toga and must complete two 1-hour shifts of community service in an assigned week. As in the past, students who are over five minutes late to a class are encouraged to stop at the attendance office, so that attendance clerk Mandy Armes can update their tardy status in Aeries rather than interrupting the teacher’s class. 

However, this policy remains optional because many teachers have varying definitions of what constitutes a student being late — some require students to be seated when the bell rings, others require that the student be in the classroom and some give a five-minute grace period before they take attendance.

“If it’s more beneficial to a teacher in their classroom to send the student down to the office, they are welcome to do that,” Cunningham said. “It’s really up to how the teacher wants to operate, but this is an option so that they don’t have to worry about it.”