Recently, students have been informed a tardy sweep will be taking place in-between periods. For the uninformed, the tardy sweep involves teachers closing their doors once the final bell for the class period rings, with late students having to go to the cafeteria for an unexcused tardy pass. A lot of students have a strong disdain towards the matter, with the common sentiment being "why waste more time going to the cafeteria when it makes us even more late and lose out on more class time?" However, there have been a few students with an idea: what happens if too many students are out late? A small group of students against tardy sweeps decided to try and find out. They spread a message around the campus like wildfire: don't go to class on time. So that day hundreds of students stayed out after the bell forming a huge line for tardy passes.
The idea of a line long enough to take a whole period to hand a tardy pass to every student had potential. From an outsider’s perspective (or a staff’s perspective) it was an unruly disorganized attempt at a protest resulting in a mass truancy and tardiness. However from an insider or student’s view (would you believe it? I’m here too) the students were making their voices heard and were even correcting the problem with the sweeps in general. Instead of wasting their class time going down to the cafeteria, they were studying and even teaching each other subjects. So many students finally understood topics they once had difficulty with. After a while, teachers who were confused as to why there were little to no students in the classroom decided to go outside and check what all the commotion outside was. They saw what was going on and thought it was too much.
This protest resulted in a lot being done to undermine the tardy sweep system. Teachers who’d grown tired of wasting their student’s learning time implemented secret knocks for students to go into class once they were late. Students continued teaching each other in the cafeteria, and with how many people were being tardy swept, full classes began to form in the cafeteria. Surprisingly shortly after this took place, student’s grades and test scores skyrocketed. It appeared that students learned more in the class time we claimed to have been wasting! In fact this was so apparent administrators had eventually decided the students were benefiting from it. This resulted in a continuation of the sweeps despite all the chaos it caused. Maybe students will eventually begin to teach each other AP subjects or even start to run their own school within ours. However, there’s also a chance they may outsmart staff and discover the top secret true purpose for tardy sweeps…
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