Tardy Sweeps Sweeping up the Innocents

Picture this: your alarm doesn’t go off, you wake up late, don’t have time to eat breakfast, and get traffic on your way to school. You walk into school thinking, “I’m running late, but if I walk fast enough, I’ll make it to class. I know I can!”

And seconds before reaching your class you hear those dreadful words: “You’re late. Go to Tardy Sweep.” Personally, I’ve never been tardy swept,  but I can imagine how annoying and irritating it must feel for those students who are hustling to get to class and get tardy swept. It’s so unfair to  see students who are hardly ever late penalized seconds before reaching their class. Sometimes, it’s not even our alarms going off that make us late. Life is so unpredictable that anything can happen to us at any moment. I would hate to be penalized for being late if, for example, my niece suddenly became ill minutes before I had to leave to school and my mom was caught up in caring for her. Anything could happen at any given time, so why should I get punished for trying my best to get to school in a hurry?

My mom always said, “Vale mas perder un minuto en la vida, que la vida en un minuto,” meaning “It’s better to lose a minute in life, than lose your life in a minute.” Traffic to school is chaotic and sometimes the APs forget that our parents can’t control the traffic; therefore, if we’re late we should be cut some slack.

The usual response from teachers and office staff is, “Well, then get to school earlier.” But what the staff doesn’t realize is that some of us can’t control what time we leave to school. For those of us who get driven to school like me, we have parents that do things before they take us to school. With that being said, if we can’t get to school as early as the administration wants us to, it’s really not our fault that our parents have other duties to take care of before taking us to school.

I believe that if students are seen rushing to class or are almost near their class, they should be given more leniency. Most of us are trying to get to class on time and it’s just not fair that some teachers and APs don’t cut us some slack for our efforts.