Beginning early October, the Loy Norrix administration started implementing a regulatory hall sweep at the beginning of most class periods throughout the school day. 

The hall sweeps begin when an administrator makes this announcement at the beginning of the class period, “Attention students and staff, we are now conducting a hall sweep. Teachers please lock your doors and do not let students in without an escort. Students in the halls with or without a pass please make your way to the cafeteria.” This usually starts somewhere between 30 seconds to one minute after the late bell rings. 

When students are cleared from the hallways and swept into the cafeteria, they will then add their names to a list before getting escorted back to their classrooms by a security guard. The list is meant to keep track of how many hall sweeps each offender has been caught in. 

LN principal Christopher Aguniaga explained the consequences for being caught in multiple hall sweeps, “The progression is the first one is a warning, okay? The second one is after-school detention. And then from there it will be depending on the individual.” Aguinaga continued. “It’s called progressive discipline, and what does that mean? It means it will be depending on how frequently the individual comes and on what other parts of their discipline records look like. It could knock it all the way up to suspension, which is not our goal. Our goal is we want to encourage kids to get to class on time. But the main focus we’ve been using is detentions, after school detentions, lunch detentions. But there have been a couple of individuals who have chosen not to serve detentions and have been suspended because of it.” 

So far hall sweeps seem to be doing their job in igniting a sense of urgency among students who need to focus on getting to class on time. Students are taking responsibility for managing their time between classes and seem to be using the time they spend in the hallways efficiently. 

Hall sweeps are still fairly new to our daily lives at Loy Norrix, and like any new idea, there are still adjustments that need to be made within the system. For starters, when the administration announced the first hall sweep, there hadn’t been any warning prior to the start of this new policy. Neither students or teachers were given news about the start to hall sweeps or information about how it would impact students daily lives and classroom instruction. There needs to be a policy that students have the ability to voice their opinions about, or there needs to be some sort of warning before the start of it. 

Additionally, for students who are issued passes by their teacher for staying late in class, getting escorted to their next class by an adult seems like a waste of time and resources. A pass is meant to be a signal that a student was given permission to be in the halls, so including students with passes in the sweep doesn’t make sense. 

Realistically, in a school with approximately 1,700 students, there will be circumstances that don’t align with the expectations of the hall sweeps. Even though teachers are not supposed to give passes during the beginning of class time, there are valid reasons people could be caught in the hallways after passing time like finishing a test or forgetting a notebook in their previous class. There should be a level of understanding for students who have passes and have legitimate educational reasons for being late.

Yes, there definitely needs to be a way to make sure students get to their classes on time. At the end of the day, some students are going to be late and they should learn to face a consequence for their actions. However the hall sweep in its current system is focused on punishing all students in the halls and not just students who are actually skipping.