After last year’s constant appearance of students misbehaving and abusing hall passes, principal Paddock and vice principals Alyssa Gardner and Derek Wennerberg said they decided to make some changes.

There have been changes to passes, the cell phone policy, and the open campus. These new rules are bound to make the school a better learning space, with only one person allowed to leave the classroom at a time with a special blue pass. Teachers are now required to ask students in the hallway if they are carrying a pass.

Principal Paddock, in her second year at Park, said these new rules are for the safety of students to know where they are throughout the day.

“In an emergency, it’s very difficult to figure out, like, if somebody’s missing because they weren’t in their assigned space,” Paddock said. 

Handling the new cell phone policy, Park has placed posters called “electronic device use” in each classroom to display the new guidelines on phones. The stoplight chart provides teachers with three tiers of device usage: red, yellow, and green. At red, devices should be in backpacks and off, at yellow, phones are allowed with permission and at the green, educational/professional use of electronic devices is allowed.

Open campus guidelines are limited this year to seniors, who must have a form signed by parents or guardians to ensure student safety off-campus. Students in grades 9–11 are not allowed to leave campus, with consequences escalating from truancy, attendance contracts, family conferences, after-school detention, and finally to dismissal.

Senior Micah Davis said he feels frustrated with the restrictive decisions made for open campus this year.

“The rules were different last year, and it’s unfair to some students like juniors who should be allowed to leave,” Davis said. “I could see freshmen and sophomores having to stay at the school, but they should allow both higher grades to leave for open campus.”

Junior Santiago Cabral had some harsh words for the after-school detention process.

“I don’t really see the purpose of after-school detention,” Cabral said. “What happens to a kid if he doesn’t show up to the school detention? Where are the buses after it? It just seems like too much to worry about to sit in a room in the school for 30 minutes.”