Maayan Keren

Students enter the building through the main entrance after the bell rings. The school only allows students to enter the building through one set of doors, the main entrance.

It’s 7:46 a.m.; you hear the bell ring, but surely the security guards will let you in. I mean, you’re only a minute late. You arrive at the door and boom, it’s locked. You are forced to walk around the whole building to get into the school when you could have just been let in through the side doors. The WJ late policy communicates to every student and faculty member that every single school entrance locks when the final bell rings to start out the normal school day. The school forbids access from any entrance other than the main entrance once classes start to ensure the safety and security of students, but this comes at the cost of many students’ instructional time.

Having this strict policy that security guards are made to enforce results in more people who drive to school being denied entrance to school. While some students are able to walk in right as that final bell rings, there are other students who arrive a few minutes later and aren’t let in. Due to this, they are forced to walk all the way around the school from the school parking lot to the main entrance, finding a line of late students trying to squeeze through the small entrance doors.

Being directed to walk around the school adds to the commuting time that it takes from parking your car to getting to class. Instead of being able to walk through the entrance closest to the parking lots, they have to add a significant amount of time to how long students are late. Now, pink late slip passes aren’t used anymore, so teachers mark any student who walks into their classroom late if they don’t have an excused note. Thus, directing students to walk around the school to enter the building adds to the amount of instructional time they are missing which is another disadvantage of this policy.

“I would have the security guards stand by the door and give some leniency to the students in the morning because it’ll get us to class in a quicker amount of time, plus our teachers are going to mark us tardy regardless, so we might as well be less late than we already are,” Morgenstern said.

Since every late student is sent to the main entrance, the office becomes overwhelmed with many people trying to enter the building and can get out of control on some occasions. On some days, there are even some students who are always on time and are burdened with missing part of their first period because of traffic that occurs when trying to pull into the parking lot.

With the new high school being opened as a holding school for Northwood, there has been an increase in heavy traffic, specifically on Old Georgetown Road. With this factor, some students will be held back which makes them late and causes them to be locked out of the side entrance of the school.

Under some circumstances, a security guard who is stationed at the student lot door may show some leniency towards students by letting them in the school a minute after the doors should have been locked. They want as many students as they can to get to class without missing too much instructional time. But other times, the student is told to walk around the entire school to get to the main entrance to check in before being able to get to class.

“The main entrance becomes overwhelmed sometimes with late students because of the walking all the way around. Maybe if we had another entrance it might be beneficial to you guys,” security guard Kelly McDonnell said.

Instead of strictly focusing on protocol, there should be a new policy showing some leniency on students. Having the doors stay unlocked for a few minutes past the bell rings could ease the foot traffic in the main entrance and make more people miss less instructional time. This would still apply to wanting to focus on student safety if a security guard stays stationed at the entrance letting students into the building.

“[I would probably want to add] some sort of grace period coming in [to school]. Maybe have a security guard checking IDs until 7:50 or a little later,” junior Hank Amaditz said.