It’s the beginning of first hour, and the announcements are blaring over the loudspeaker “Surprise, Surprise!” Principal Aguinaga trills, startling you awake as he warns the school about an upcoming hall sweep that could result in suspension. These hall sweeps can happen any day and any time. However, they’re not a completely new procedure.
“Hall sweeps started well before I got here four years ago,” said assistant principal Alexander Hill. “Its purpose is to clear the halls as soon as possible and get students in class. Hall sweeps happen every single day, every single hour.”
What’s new about these “surprise” hall sweeps that Aguinaga refers to is that students caught in the halls during them will automatically receive a suspension if they already have one tardy. These hall sweeps are called “Letter Days.”
“Every now and then, whether it’s once a week or once every other week, we do a Letter Day,” said Hill. “A Letter Day is where we pick a random hour of a random day, and that hour is going to be an hour that students that are late are going to get a suspension letter. If it is their first tardy of the week, they don’t get a suspension letter at all. But if they’ve already had multiple and they’re tardy that hour, it’s going to be a suspension.”
Senior Hope Lindblade was suspended in December after getting caught in a Letter Day hall sweep.
“I had one tardy already that week, so they suspended me just because I was getting another one,” said Lindblade. “You get handed the letter when you’re getting a pass. It was actually really weird, it freaked me out because I wasn’t expecting that.”
Lindblade was stuck in the bathroom traffic, even though she was trying to rush to avoid being tardy. The bathrooms are an ongoing issue for many students during passing time, with many either inaccessible or too crowded to use in a reasonable amount of time.
“The bathroom was so full, I was literally just waiting. I was trying to hurry up right before because I thought I might be late, but as soon as I heard him [Hill] yelling, I started to get worried,” said Lindblade.
The lack of campus security and staff also adds to the problem of students remaining in the halls after passing time.
During lunch, all security guards are stationed around the cafeteria. This creates a lack of campus safety officers who are able to monitor bathrooms outside of the cafeteria area, resulting in all unmonitored bathrooms being locked.
“The only bathrooms that are open during lunchtime are these bathrooms over here [cafeteria] because the other ones are closed,” said behavior interventionist Lennise Von-Williams. “I believe it’s because security is all over here during lunch. They’re not in their spots where they usually are because they all have to be in the cafeteria.”
While some students, like Lindblade, find themselves in situations that cause them to be tardy, many don’t even try to get to class on time. Some cases are discussed with administration rather than the student being immediately suspended, but the clear policy is for the tardy student to be handed a suspension letter promptly.
“We do take it situation by situation, but I wish you could hear some of the excuses we get because there are some crazy ones,” said Hill. “Suspensions aren’t always automatic, we do have some conversations, but 9 times out of 10, the policy is in place for a reason and we stick to it pretty tightly.”
In a normal hall sweep, students must get a pass, which marks them tardy. Getting six or more tardies in one week will result in a one-day suspension. Before that number is met, however, other means of punishment are in place for tardy students before suspension is reached.
“Contacting parents, detention, and a parent meeting are steps that are in place before we get to a suspension,” said Hill. “Suspension comes at that sixth tardy of the week, which we feel is a very high number.”
However, on Letter Days, suspensions can come as a surprise to students without the added warnings. A suspension on a student’s permanent record can also have significant effects on post-secondary plans. Colleges take punishments like suspensions into account when looking at a student’s application, which has the possibility of affecting the students chances of getting into the college they want. In addition to its effects on students’ records, suspensions as a form of punishment has been a heavily debated topic for many years in the educational world.
“If you just have one tardy in a week and get another one, you’re suspended,” said Lindblade. “It’s not fair. They want us to be in school, but they’re taking every opportunity to take us out of school. I feel like more detentions would be a lot better than a suspension because then you’re not actually missing school.”
Suspending students as a regular form of punishment can account for lots of missed instructional time and possible harmful consequences.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Exclusionary school discipline has a negative effect on school climate, and high rates of suspension and expulsion are correlated with lower academic achievement schoolwide.”
As stated by Hill, the procedure isn’t flawless; however, it seems to be the best option to deal with the issue.
“We want there to be urgency to get to class on time,” said Hill. “We don’t want to do this, but we’ve found that if they don’t have that consequence, some of our students think that being late is no big deal. That ruins instruction time for teachers and it throws everything off.”
Despite the downsides, Letter Days continue to decrease the number of tardies, overall benefiting students and teachers.
“Since we’ve implemented Letter Days, our tardy numbers have gone down on a daily basis, just because students are worried,” said Hill. “I even hear it when I’m scanning IDs, they’re like ‘Is this the suspension hour?’ So it is working. We don’t like that we have to go there to make our hall sweeps work and get students to their class, but if that’s what we gotta do, that’s what we’re gonna do.”
Still, other kinds of discipline may continue to reduce tardiness without keeping kids out of school. One of the solutions that has been mentioned is in-school suspensions, a punishment in which the student is placed in a designated supervised classroom for a day where they’re to complete their work away from their regular classes. In-school suspensions isolate the student from their peers, while still keeping them on track with their school work in the school setting.
“It would be nice to have in-school suspensions, but the problem with that is they would have to have a teacher do the in-school suspension, and we don’t have a teacher for that,” said Von-Williams.
While students and staff think that reform is needed for punishment, many think that the system can be changed to reduce the need for punishment at all.
“It would be nice if we had hall monitors on top of security,” said Von-Williams. “If we had volunteers, that would be nice, to walk the halls and to be stationed at their bathrooms. That would help if we had more employees, and kids would probably get to class on time then, too.”
