Students feel admin meetings for being late are unnecessary, waste time, and do not support students accurately. Efforts should be focused on education. Tardy Meetings only add to the problem rather than solving it.

Every day many students show up late to school past the last bell at 8:05 a.m.. Most of the students who show up late are late because of a simple mistake, sleeping through their alarm or forgetting their backpack at home, resulting in them showing up only a few minutes past the bell.

However, if a student shows up only a few minutes late, they are required to wait in a long line to speak to an administrator, which can waste up to 30 more minutes of their time.

Students having to meet with administrators after five tardies makes more sense because a one-time tardy could be a total mistake, not a habit.

The goal behind these Tardy Meetings is to make sure students don’t show up late again and waste class time, but most of the students who end up in these meetings are late because of a simple mistake, not an intentional choice.

During the meetings, the students speak with an administrator about how they can prevent themselves from being late again.

The meetings started because of an influx of student tardiness at the beginning of the day.

The school believes these meetings will get students to class faster; however, the administrator meetings are almost guaranteed to make the students miss 15 to 30 minutes of their class.

“I left my phone in my car on accident and walked in 30 seconds after the bell, then I had to go to a meeting which made me 25 minutes late to first period,” junior Alessandro Rush said.

A survey was sent out to every student at Lake Stevens High School, and the survey received 35 responses.

Out of everyone who responded, 97.5% of those people think that the meetings are a waste of time, do not actually help or benefit the students in any way, and only cause more stress upon students adding on to any other things they may be worried about in their life.

The 2.5%, who said they did not believe the meetings were a waste of time, gave further responses and explained that they disliked the process and how much time it wasted; however, they had had a pleasant interaction with the administrator they spoke to, hence their answer.

“The meeting with an administrator made me like 23 minutes late to class when I probably would have walked in 2 or 3 minutes after the bell. I also was never late before; it was my first time. I forgot my Chromebook” junior Fikir Wubu said.

The main concern from students about these meetings is that they do the opposite of helping students get to class.

Administrator meetings are a negative addition to the attendance policy at Lake Stevens High School and should be rethought and reconstructed to actually have a positive impact on students’ time in the classroom.