This year, Seminole High School is trying to limit lateness by establishing a system called Tardy Hero. This controversial system requires tardy students to go to the closest building office and get their ID scanned. The Tardy Hero then prints a late pass includes their absence record. Despite its goal of preventing students from being late, many are complaining that the lengthy process of Tardy Hero actually ends up making them lose class time. 

In many cases, students say that although a teacher might have admitted them to class before Tardy Hero was implemented, the system now forces them to get a pass and risk impacting their attendance records. Instead of being a minor inconvenience, lateness under Tardy Hero now becomes a major hassle on students’ grades that interrupts the other students’ learning.

“Tardy Hero is ineffective because in the amount of time that it takes for a student to go back to their class, the student has wasted half the class period already,” said senior Rachel Sauls.

In fact, because Tardy Hero is a lengthy process that can lead to punishment, many students find being absent preferable to having to get a pass. This is an entirely natural reaction, given that Tardy Hero makes tardiness seem like a more punishable offense than absence itself. Students who might have otherwise chosen to attend class, even if they were late, are now having to choose between being punished or missing class— and for many, that is not much of a choice at all. Some have reported seeing their classmates skip class entirely rather than risk having to go through Tardy Hero.

Thus, Tardy Hero inherently contradicts itself and is defeating the purpose of trying to keep more students in class. While it ensures a student is disciplined and receives consequences for being tardy, the system leads to students being more late than they originally were— or absent entirely— which ultimately results in loss of class material and waste of instructional time.

Students view Tardy Hero as redundant, unreliable, and hypocritical. For example, last week the Warrior Office was not able to run the Tardy Hero system. They ended up sending all the students to a different building’s office, where they had to wait in a long line to get a pass,  wasting more of their time.                                                                                                                                              

“Students walk to class and have their teachers tell them to turn around, go out of their way, and get a pass to class because they were tardy. This process takes around 5-10 minutes out of class time versus the 30 seconds to a minute the student would have originally missed,” said senior Sianna Lovell.

Still, it is acknowledged that Tardy Hero may be beneficial to the attendance staff, allowing them to easily record and organize tardy offenses. Several administrators report Tardy Hero’s success, from their perspective, in limiting wandering students. Some say that the halls and the campus in general are a lot emptier during classes compared to last year.

“I understand why some students are distraught, due to this being a fairly new system, but I have noticed fewer wandering around campus and it seems as if the system is working,” said media tech Kim Bridges.