Tardy calls good for students and school, says Olympian

A student walks home from a friend’s house at night and sees that it’s almost six o’ clock. The student starts speeding up,  knowing that the call of doom is about to arrive at home. He runs up the steps and opens the door just to find mom on the phone, and realizes it’s too late.

“You were late for three of your classes?!” the mom screams. Then the lecture begins.

While students may not like them, we at The Olympian approve of these tardy phone calls because they help parents to be aware of their children’s attendance at school. When parents become notified about their children’s tardies, they can encourage or discipline their kids to stop being late.

These phone calls home started at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. Before this system, there were a lot more tardies. In between August and December of 2010, there were around 26,238 tardies. But from August to December of 2011, there were around 16,734 tardies. That’s about 9,500 fewer tardies. It seems like these tardy calls are working.

The thing about these calls is that the school only calls once. If a parent picks up the phone, she would hear a recording of all the tardies that her student had that day. This can be a good thing because one phone call can tell the parent everything that is needed to be heard, but it can also be a bad thing, too. The phone call can be intercepted by the student, and the parents would never know. The student would then be able to get away with being tardy.

But there are more things that The Olympian feels are good about these phone calls. They would help catch errors that teachers make when they are doing the attendance, and the faster the students know about these mistakes, the faster they can get them fixed. Another good thing about these calls is that they can encourage good attendance for those who don’t police themselves well.

For these reasons, we at The Olympian believe that these tardy calls are good for students and the school.