By Dulce Florez and Aileen Ortiz
It’s hard to ignore the long lines formed outside the front office each morning, often exceeding 200 students.
These students are not there for exercise; they are tardy.
Beginning Oct. 23, Pueblo administration began enforcing the new tardy policy.
Assistant principal Meg Tully, who helps enforce this policy, said, “We [administration] needed to send a message to students about their excessive tardies.”
Students who arrive at 8:10 a.m. or thereafter (on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; and on Wednesdays after 8:50) will have to stand in line in order to receive a time-stamped color-coded pass when they at last arrive at the health office lobby.
“Tardies have been a huge problem for Pueblo for many years,” said Tully. “We administrators are helping out teachers in terms of hopefully changing student behavior.”
Once students arrive at the health office lobby after standing in line for as long as 20 minutes, students will need to have their ID or Student Vue scanned, at which time they will receive a time-stamped colored pass to be admitted to their classes.
Not everybody is happy about the policy.
Junior Jessica Palomares said, “This new tardy policy is stupid. It’s all a waste of time because it’s making students even later to their first period of the day. I don’t understand why it’s so inconvenient for teachers to mark students late.”
However, some students see the logic in the policy.
Jose Urquijo, a junior, said, “I think that the new tardy rules are better because we will see better behavior among the students, and thus we will have a better education and more control over the students who have a really bad habit of coming to school late.”
However, Tully and the other administrators are very “enthusiastic” about the new tardy policy and remind students that this policy will continue “indefinitely”.
“We have seen a drop of tardy students over the past few weeks,” Tully said. “In the beginning, there were an average of about 260 students tardy, and now that number is about 220 students, which is still high but still an improvement.”