The new school year at Los Banos High school has brought new rules and policies regarding tardiness and the use of the bathroom but not everyone agrees with these new policies.

The first policy students must wait 15 minutes to go to the bathroom unless it is an emergency students may go to the nurse. Another policy is that if you are late to first or fifth period, students have to get an orange pass from the front office to be allowed in class and after a certain amount of orange passes, students will get lunch detention or their lunch pass can be taken away. These two policies have been controversial with students but this is a more stricter way of disciplining students who skip out of classes in the bathroom and students who are consistently tardy to class.

PawPrint News conducted an anonymous survey on Google forms for students to express their feelings on these two new policies.

The statistics were 88.9% of students voted for a negative on the bathroom policy and 11.1% of students voted for a positive. The Negative side of responses had very much the same answers being that “waiting 15 minutes increases the need to go.” Another response said, “I’m assuming that this rule was put in place to prevent crowding in the bathrooms during the first 15 minutes, more specifically those going to smoke or skip class. If that’s the case, I don’t think it resolves the issue completely, since those students will just go and do just that once the 15 minute period is up.”

As for the bathroom policies, Luke Reyna (11) stated, “The bathroom’s policies aren’t very efficient and causes a lot of unnecessary crowding of the bathrooms because by not letting people go the first 15 minutes of class and last 10 minutes, it leaves a small window of time for students to use the restroom especially since it’s only one at a time.”

Ethan Briseno (11) stated, “The bathroom policy kind of sucks having to wait 15 minutes before I can use the restroom.” 

The tardy policy part of the survey showed 77.8% of students voted negative and 22.2% of students voted positive. Ethan Briseno (11) shared a response saying, “The tardy policy just makes me more late to class.” Another student said, “I don’t agree with punishing students for being late by making them even more late. It’s contradictory and unfair. Making students line up and sign in for a pass takes up unnecessary time that could’ve been used for in-class instruction. My two-minute tardy easily turns into ten minutes. Especially during first period where many students have situations where they can’t make it exactly on time, for example, they have siblings to drop off or their parents have work. I don’t think this should be counted against the student completely.”

Reyna stated, “I feel like the tardy policies aren’t very effective because it encourages students to not even want to show up to that class /period if they are already late.” 

Lastly, Celeste Herrera (10) said, “The tardy policy doesn’t take into account the situations students may suddenly run into. We can’t control when emergencies happen, like if we get stuck in traffic, or are running late because of our parents, especially students who don’t have licenses.”

As for the positive side, a student said, “People do wander around even when the bell rings which makes them late to class.”

Mrs. Snively, learning director, said the bathroom policy is very effective by allowing only five students at a time to leave the classroom which makes it easier in a vaping situation to see who was the one vaping and who wasn’t compared to having twenty students and making it harder to know who was vaping. However, the challenge is making sure they have the manpower to keep pursuing the policy at each bathroom.

So, Tigers, do we think there needs to be a change up in both the tardy and bathroom policies… or not?