On November 1st, 2023, the students of NHHS experienced their first-ever tardy sweep. There have been six tardy sweeps over three weeks, the most recent on November 16th, 2023.
When the announcements blared tardy sweep warnings, students raced to get to their classes on time before they were locked out. It was expected of teachers to keep late students out while other staff members rounded up late students.
There were mixed reactions from both students and staff. Many students feel inconvenienced, since they cannot walk across campus on time. The tardy sweep causes students to stress out about getting to class on time but, also encourages better punctuality.
An anonymous 12th grader stated, “I have to keep my attendance up because I’m a senior but also because of the tardy sweeps, so I mean it’s a pretty good thing, I think students should go to their classes.”
When asked if the tardy sweeps fostered a better learning environment the same student responded, “[During] the first tardy sweep everyone was rushing to class, so it was a lot more crazy, but still around the same amount of people absent. It was way more quiet.¨
According to another anonymous student, during the first tardy sweep,”They kept them [kids caught in the first tardy sweep] in the auto shop for thirty minutes… until they gave them a paper to go back to class.”
An anonymous staff member stated, “It makes no sense to me that students get caught in a tardy sweep because they warn you like six or seven times. I’m not sure what else you would need to know that you should probably go to class – one class isn’t going to hurt you to go that you’re [used to] ditching even if you are a habitual ditcher.¨
The staff member feels,¨It happens like what, once a week maybe” and,¨You just have to rush[across campus, 0.2 miles]…Seven minutes, that seems like a sufficient amount of time…to me it’s a you kind of thing, it’s a personal issue, you either decide to do it or you don’t¨
Diego Duarte, one of the deans who is regularly tasked with clearing swarms of students from around the C building, stated, “They need to know that in the real world, they’re not going to have that same sort of cushion – that there’s going to be real accountability for tardiness.¨
Another anonymous 12th-grade student explained their experience getting caught in a tardy sweep:¨It happened to me like last week. It was my second period, and I came late to school. I didn’t know it was a tardy sweep, I knocked on her [second-period teacher´s] door; I was late for like 2 minutes and I knocked on her door and she didn’t open and she[one of the staff that walked around] caught me.¨ This student was released after explaining the situation to the staff member who caught them.
According to Vice Principal Xavier Chavez, tardy sweeps have not been used in NHHS since the COVID lockdown when they were “common practice” and were even unannounced.
When asked why the current tardy sweeps were announced, Chavez stated “Part of the reason we didn’t do them for a while is because the attendance sort of procedures after COVID changed…I would say this is the first year where there are literally no COVID restrictions…so that made it to where we could go back to pre-covid times and enforce attendance the way we used to.”
Mr. Duarte stated,”We didn’t want to just hit them from one day to another. In the future, we are going to be doing tardy sweeps where we’re not going to be announcing the tardy sweeps.”
When asked about future tardy sweeps, Mr. Chavez answered, “I think now that it’s been around for weeks now and now that you guys know the procedure I think now we would start to do the unannounced again. We just didn’t want to go from nothing to boom[unannounced tardy sweeps] and then kids are like wow.”
Mr. Chavez explained, ¨We aren’t trying to catch you guys. I don’t think the goal is to punish you. The goal is just to get you guys[students] to get to class on time.¨
Mr. Duarte stated,¨Its removing the students that are getting too comfortable with being tardy, and maybe this brings a little bit of them being uncomfortable and seeing that there is accountability to being tardy and removes them from the other students that are chronically ditching or tardy or absent.¨
Mr. Chavez explained,¨The easiest way for us to focus on those kids[chronic ditchers] is to make sure everyone else is in class… then we could just focus on those kids that are out, then it makes us better at kind of isolating the problem.¨
Chavez mentioned, ¨There are groups of students who have complained and said I leave as soon as the bell rings and I cannot get there in time,¨
¨If you do it period four or period six, then we’re doing it in the in-between time. And it makes it harder for students to get there. But, if you do it period three or period five or period two when they’re not doing that long walk, then we feel like there’s no excuse for not getting to class.”
¨We’ve never done a tardy sweep in this level of construction, and that’s when we found groups of students that pushed back and said, I did the best that I should and didn’t get there on time, so we’re kind of rolling it out little by little until we figure out how to do it best,¨
Mr. Chavez explained. ¨They [students] are responding to the announcement to get to class on time. In that period, the halls are cleared. You can feel it immediately.¨
According to Mr. Chavez and Mr. Duarte, The first tardy sweep caught around eighty students, the second one caught about 40, but the most recent one only caught about fifteen or twelve.
