The regulations related to tardiness and truancy, which were implemented fully right after fall break have started to have wider repercussions for students at this school. Truancy, aka skipping, and tardiness are the acts of missing some or all of a certain class period without an excuse (your guardians calling the school). Considering the increase in late or absent students, it was necessary for the school to start to enforce its system of punishment. Currently, the system consists of increasing punishments for truant students, starting with warnings and building to detentions and later to suspensions.

This seems like a pretty reasonable list of punishments, considering that the school doesn’t always have time to follow up on students who have missed class, and none of the punishments are reported on your permanent record. Instead, the consequences act as more of a deterrent, pushing students to attend their classes and holding them accountable for their attendance. Without the guidelines it can become a little too convenient to miss out on class for something more enjoyable like going to get food, talking to a friend, or catching up on sleep. Personally, the guidelines both fairly and effectively started to regulate my attendance, at least to a greater degree.

When going to class became too tedious, I fell into the bad habit of skipping classes that didn’t fully capture my attention. The new guidelines played a major role in curbing this inclination. The people at student services brought me down and spoke to me about missing class. From my experience, most of the people at student services who actually spoke to me about why I was skipping so much class treated me with respect, tried to understand my reasons (of which there were not many) and gave me advice that I felt motivated to follow. This intervention effectively ended my desire to cut class and promoted healthy learning. 

However, the overall procedure for alerting me about the attendance system, while beneficial in most ways, had some setbacks. For one, in order to talk to me about missing class, I was pulled out of class. In total, this made me lose around three hours of class time, which eventually impacted my grades. For another, some administrators seemed to judge me, dismissed any questions I had, and spoke in a tight, angry tone. These two factors limited the efficiency of the overall process, bringing me close to tears and rattling my focus during the school day. 

However, despite the occasional bad experience, most members of the administration reminded me that every student at Carmel does matter. And sometimes, when you aren’t quite feeling yourself, or you have something going on in your life as most high schoolers do, it’s a nice reminder to know there are people out there who care.

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