Leaving your warm bed earlier than 7 a.m. to drag yourself to school is a feat. However, let’s say you get stuck at one more red light than usual, or you have to run back home to grab your calculator, and you pull up to school parking lot at a mere 8:31 a.m.; to your dismay, the gate is already locked, and you have to trudge along the side of the road to the office. Once arriving, you’re stuck in a line of students to get your tardy pass, effectively wasting fifteen minutes of class time and making you come to class late with a flustered and annoyed attitude. Then later in the day whilst suffering through a math test, through the window you see a group of laughing students leaving easily through a gate with their keys swinging. 

I appreciate how efficient the school is with allowing students to leave early: have a parent call the office, get called out of class and leave through one of the gates. What I do think we should change is the difficulty of entering the school. For one it can be extremely annoying to have to walk all the way to the office from the student parking lot, when there’s not even a real pathway, and the process of waiting and getting your tardy pass can be time-consuming taking away from whatever was going on in class that you were hurrying to anyways.

However, I’m not saying tardies shouldn’t be a thing, punctuality is an important trait. Some say that school can be modeled after a job; day in and day out, with a timed lunch break and ruled by the clock. But even in the workplace, people are given a 1–3-minute leeway when clocking in. Sometimes tardiness is truly caused by factors you could not control, and no one deserves to be locked out for being a minute late.

This problem can lead to such increased frustration that sometimes students even try to come through a side gate by having someone open it for them, which is largely frowned upon. Students can get harsh punishments for not entering through the office, creating even more frustration and resentment, yet no one has called to attention that this problem can be solved.

A great solution to this issue is simply having an administrator stand at the gate, and hold it open for an extra minute or two. The students who come through just a little later will not get tardies unless it’s a repeated pattern (multiple times per week), therefore eliminating the trek to the office and the wasted time spent. This way there is an ounce of leniency for our beloved Robinson students, but punctuality still has an emphasis. 

Either way, this problem needs to be solved as soon as possible, because starting school should be as simple as leaving it.