According to  the 6425 news and the park connection slides hallway resets are going to be starting up again at Park., attempting to curtail tardies and absences from classes. Park has put this into effect a couple times this year and last year. These attempts haven’t been very effective since they don’t punish students effectively.

One of the most recent attempts at cutting down on absences at Park is the detention policy. The policy isn’t really effective seeing as it’s pretty much a study hall that extends after school. The primary punishment for missing detention was just obtaining more detentions until parents are contacted.

Last year Park also instituted hallway resets, but it only harmed the education of students who happened to be late because they weren’t fast enough to class. The punishment for being in the hallway when you are supposed to be in class was being marked absent, which generally wasn’t enough of a punishment for the people skipping class on purpose, and only stressed out the students who were doing their best to make it to class on time.

I am not a fan of how Park has the hallway resets work this year. They completely remove students from the hallways, even if they were already on the way to class, and move them to the auditorium. Only after this process are students taken back to their class. This system feels extremely ineffective as it takes learning time away from students and makes them later than they would have been without the hallway resets. Even with the weaknesses this system sports, there are some strengths to using hallway resets as it punishes the students who weren’t on the way to class.

Students who make extra stops on the way to class are hurt by this system. It encourages students that have lockers to not to use them since  they could be punished because of the hallway reset if they don’t arrive to class on time. Students who don’t like carrying around backpacks and other various things have a smaller window to grab things from their lockers during passing time, especially when the lockers are far away from the classes they are going to.

Another problem I see with hallway resets are students who are working in the hallway. The hallway can be a wonderful area for students to work in during class. Adding hallway resets restricts students from working in the hallway because of the risk of being out in the hall when the reset occurs. This system takes away a valuable resource for students and teachers to use.

The hallway resets are done at random and are not told to the students beforehand. This makes perfect sense as it catches students who consistently skip class. This, sadly, is the only semi-effective thing in the system as it allows Park to grab students who are skipping class from the hallways at times they don’t expect it. The only weakness to doing this is that the students they are working to catch are the ones who don’t particularly care about having absences and detentions. 

The strengths of this system are heavily overshadowed by the weaknesses. The fact that it punishes students who are slow and have extra stops, such as a locker to grab their stuff, is not good for the students who are trying to make it to class on time. However, this might be the best system that we can have for the school. Acknowledging this, I would like one specific change. Delaying the hallway reset would be a good change, so that students that are trying to arrive to class on time but are running a little late can make it to class. This doesn’t solve all the problems that I see with hallway resets, but it most certainly eases the brute of the problem.