Tim Rogers: Don't be tardy

DALTON — Good morning.

The Dalton Board of Education has decided that Dalton High School students will get out at 3:40 p.m. this year instead of 3:59 p.m. and start class at 8:15 a.m. instead of 8:20.

Now that they are done monkeying with the schedule, it doesn’t seem like the first and final bells will be any problem. All of those other bells in between may be a different matter, however.

To achieve this 14-minute time savings, the board cut the time between classes from six minutes to three minutes.

Board member Danny Crutchfield said he was concerned that wasn’t enough time for students to make it from class to class. That’s a good concern, I think, but Superintendent Jim Hawkins said there would still be some flexibility in the time between classes.

“We have to decide when tardy is,” he said after the meeting, saying that a student might not be tardy when the bell rings.

I like that phrase — decide what tardy is.

And here I always thought it was if you weren’t in your classroom after the bell rings to begin a class period.

That’s how it was at my high school. And if you were caught in the hall when the classroom doors closed you were out of luck if you didn’t have a sympathetic teacher or one who left their door open.

You were also at the mercy of our assistant principal, who roamed the halls looking for victims the way Lawrence Taylor stalked quarterbacks, and made sure you understood the seriousness of your crime against time after she had brought you back to her office.

No one ever got their leg broken by her, but I have no doubt that our defense would have been faster and meaner if she had been the coach.

To this day, I have no idea what she contributed to the academic life at Chapel Hill High, but she kept order in the halls and made sure that you recognized that being on time was infinitely better than being a second late.

Which brings me to the series of 3-minute track meets it seems that Dalton High students will have to go through every day this year to get to class.

Now, I am no hallway efficiency expert and I try to avoid the cattle call of changing classes whenever I have to visit a high school. And I do understand that schools want as little time between class periods as possible to forestall any unauthorized activities that might take place during the down time. Give a teenage just enough time to get their books and get to class; any more is too much.

But I also know that 180 seconds is not a lot of time.

It will be inadvisable, it seems to me, for any teacher to be standing in a doorway when the bell to either dismiss or start class is about to ring. If a student has a class on the other side of campus — and don’t forget there is a brand new addition to the school this year — they will shoot out of their desk like an arrow loosed from a bow and probably not even stop for whatever damage they leave in their wake.

Forget about stopping to talk in the halls, what if you have to go to the bathroom between classes?

Three minutes may be more time than I realize. My son, for instance, can probably text the equivalent of “War and Peace” in three minutes.

But if you are trying to teach teenagers the value of time and the importance of not being late, I think that leaving tardy decisions up in the air might not be the way to go.

Teenagers will either get confused if there is any vagueness to what constitutes being tardy, or they will drive a truck through that vagueness when they have to try and wiggle out of a jam.

This is far from the most serious issue that the board and Dalton Public Schools will face this year, but it seems like if you already think that some students will have a hard time getting to class on time, then you should increase the time they have between classes and not have to “decide what tardy is.”

Tardy is being late. My old assistant principal taught me that.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go. I think I hear her coming.

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