At Smoky Hill High School when a student is late, they go to a new thing called the tardy cart. The tardy cart was brought back after 2 years of it being gone. A lot of SHHS students are not happy with this decision.

 “honestly everyone sees that it’s a big waste of time,” said Shawn Gulati (9).

First of all, kids that are late for any reason have to spend more time being out of class in the halls getting a pass, and coming back to class. Kids are marked absent if they are 10 minutes late or more and it takes 5 minutes to get a tardy pass so it hurts the students.

 “It was here for my freshmen and part of my sophomore year. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now, to be honest,” said Audom Taylor (12).

So is the tardy cart good or bad? So far we’ve heard from students so let’s hear from the assistant principal Andre Bala on why he brought the cart back.

“So coming back to school, you know, as a staff, and students as well, he noticed just a lot of students in the hallways well beyond the tardy bell ringing and it was problematic for a lot of reasons,” said Bala.

Next, after he saw this problem he came up with a solution and that solution was to bring back the tardy cart from 1 and a half years ago.

“Before COVID and before the pandemic, with the tardy cart in place, we didn’t need it because our school culture and our practices and habits were in a pretty, you know, a good spot where we didn’t need such a thing,” said Bala.

There has been a significant improvement in attendance sense then so maybe it isn’t so bad after all.

“We still have some room to grow in this process and also in resetting expectations across the school. But this is all about care and I care about our kids so much that I will implement such a thing to get them to do the right thing,” said Bala.