Chronic absenteeism is the strongest predictor of school performance, and there is a strong negative association between tardiness and GPA. After all, it’s hard for students to do well at school if they aren’t at school most of the time. Thus high schools across the nation do everything from enacting strict tardy and truancy policies to desperately offering incentives for students to simply attend school.
Fortunately, the paradigm at MVHS is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Attendance is stellar, even at less productive times such as the last week of school. But there is still one major problem that teachers face — student tardiness. In the school week of December 14-18, 6% of students were tardy to class. That’s about a hundred students a day.
Although students lose little by being tardy, other than several minutes of “precious” class time, they can be a big distraction to the teacher’s class. When a student walks in late, he has usually missed an instruction already, which means that the teacher needs to stop what he’s doing to inform the student. Otherwise, the late student distracts the students around him in an effort to discern the missed instruction, which also disrupts the class. Multiply the effect of one tardy student by the number that usually show up late, and the result is a class that doesn’t start when it should. Because there are only 55 minutes in a period, even a delay of a few minutes is often significant.
It depends on the class, but individual tardies often have a bigger effect than many realize, which is why teachers often penalize students for being late. And the truth is, students have no legitimate excuse for being late (other than a doctor’s appointment). All students live within a reasonable proximity to school, so the school commute should always be short. A common complaint is the heavy traffic before school, but beating the traffic is easy; it’s only a matter of getting up earlier, or riding a bicycle to school. A two-mile commute to school only takes about a ten minute bicycle trip, riding at a comfortable pace.
Thus, if students are late to class, their actions deserve repercussions and they should take those consequences without excuse. The entire point of these consequences is to prevent students from being late, but it has created a group of people who accept the consequences and show up chronically late anyways. They do so for a variety of reasons: either the penalty for being late isn’t strict enough, they don’t value the class enough, or some other reason. It depends on the class. Thus it would be interesting and revealing for teachers to consider motivations of these students to come chronically late, as it is a telling reflection of how their class is run and viewed by students. After all, even though it is the student’s responsibility to come on time, teachers can also change their policies to combat tardiness.
