Making sure students are getting to school on time has become a priority for teachers. After all, education is important, right?

Here at Robinson High School, there has been issued a policy where if students arrived in their first-period class on time, they would be entered into a raffle to win a jolly rancher. Doesn’t that just sound amazing? A single jolly rancher. As if students would actually become motivated to come to class on time to receive one jolly rancher. Let me start off by saying that this incentive is absolutely useless. It’s simply not the right way to motivate students to come to class on time.

There’s no guarantee that your class would win anyway, as it’s a raffle. If two classes had perfect attendance one day and all the other classes are disregarded, only 1 class would win out of those two. Students who consistently show up late to class wouldn’t become anymore motivated to arrive on time. This is another reason why the incentive wouldn’t work. A single jolly rancher just isn’t enough to motivate students to show up on time.

It’s almost laughable that the principal and assistant principals thought that jolly ranchers would fix the tardy issue. A lot of teachers seemed skeptical about the effectiveness of the new incentive, and to be quite honest, I am not surprised. I cannot even begin to think what was going through their minds at the time they were trying to fix the problem.

There are tons of other ways that they could have fixed this tardy issue. I suggest rewarding the winning class with an option to exempt an assignment or a Friday pizza party. But a jolly rancher? Let me repeat: A single jolly rancher for each student in the winning class. Yeah, good luck with that. No one is going to change their mind about coming to school.