Have you heard about the new hall sweep rule?! The hall sweep rule was put in place about four weeks ago. The rule is that you must have a pass at all times in the hall. This is designed to have fewer students roaming the halls and fewer people skipping class. If you are in the halls without a pass, you get swept by student management into a separate classroom and get detention for the remainder of the period.
In an effort to gather information on how people feel about this rule, I interviewed three teachers and eight students about their opinions, changes that they’ve noticed, and whether or not they have alternative ideas for dealing with this issue.
To my surprise, a lot of people do not like the rule. A freshman student said, “That’s stupid, a kid already doesn’t want to go to class so they take them away to another classroom.”
Another 9th-grade student said, “Detention seems a little bit crazy, I think there should be a warning first before they go straight to another class. I also haven’t seen lots of change, maybe just less people roaming the halls.”
I also interviewed Mr. Strandberg about his opinions. In summary, he said maybe there should be another system of detention. He called it The Ladder Method. He explained how the first step could be a lunch detention, then 2 lunch detentions, then after-school detention, then half-day in-school detention and a chat with their parents, full-day in-school detention, and then lastly, suspension because they haven’t learned their lesson.
On the other hand, there were people who did appreciate the rule change. Freshman Lacey Veltkamp said, “I think it’s a smart rule because that way student management knows if your teacher let you out in the halls or not.” When I asked Veltkamp if she had seen any change and if she liked the punishment she said “I’ve noticed less people roaming the halls and I think that detention is a good punishment.”
Mr. Moffat also provided some input and explained how he appreciates the attempt to get students to class and that maybe we could take their parking pass instead of detention because most people care about their passes.
At the beginning of the year, students skipping class was quite a big problem. Student management started noticing it and made the hall sweep rule. After talking to Rocky in student management, he explained how the issue has gotten a lot better. The rule starts 10 minutes after the period starts, so it gives people plenty of time to get to class and the number of students swept depends on the day. If they start this rule at the beginning of next year, I think that this will resolve the problem a lot sooner. So what do you think about the hall sweep rule?
