My rant at part of the school's system ,and how I'd change it for the better.

A few things you need to know to understand this:

1) My school just finished a five year long construction project. To have less kids in the building during construction, they instituted "senior privilege:" All seniors have the option of not having a class first or last period, therefore coming in late or leaving early, and having a couple hundred kids gone from the building. When the construction ended this year, they considered getting rid of senior privilege entirely, but the entire student population almost rioted, since they "worked hard" to have the credits available to be able to take off for one period a day their senior year. (I never had this program in high school, and in fact I lament that there were classes I wanted to take but never had the time, such as theatre arts and tv production. So behind the back of my students that think this way, I call them lazy brats. But that's another story.) In the end, they kept senior privilege, but only for first period. Parents complained because some kids used senior privilege to get to their after-school jobs early, but I'm sorry, most of the kids don't consider this program as a jump start on getting into the work force.

2) Because part of the student population doesn't get here until second period, that's when official school attendance is taken. Attendance is taken by filling in a bubble next to a name on a scantron sheet. The folder with the scantron sheet is left outside the classroom door. A woman walks around the entire school collecting these folders to be brought to the attendance office.

3) Here's how second period works in my school, attendance-wise, in the music department. All of the upperclassman groups meet second period. Everyone who enrolled in more than one ensemble (say, band and choir) is not in one room every day. We switch off. Yes, it's quite a bitch to lose 30% of your ensemble for half the week, every week. But the kids don't have room in their schedule for a second elective. But the attendance lists are not the same lists as the class lists for second period. That would be too easy. Official attendance for people enrolled in just band are assigned to the band director. Ditto for orchestra. But I co-teach choir, so everyone who's just in choir is split up between my list and my colleague's. Everyone in band and choir is listed under the band director. Almost all the orchestra/choir people are under the orchestra director. Except for two or three people who are under the choir lists. I don't know why. So how does the one teacher take attendace when some people on the lists are supposed to be in a different room that day? Have kids take attendance and have them duck into the other rooms to check if they're here.

4) The kids don't have homeroom on a regular basis. When they do, it's a 20 minute period between second and third period. They get these 20 minutes by making first, second and third periods seven minutes shorter. None of the other classes are affected. As someone whose major classes are first, second and third period, it pisses me off sometimes.

All of these amount to major problems. Here's another list why.

1) The seniors in my second period class do not arrive on time. They'll arrive anywhere from five to forty minutes late.

2) The kids that have been taking my attendance have been marking them present, in anticipation that they'll show up. I told them to mark them absent until they show up. They did the first part, and not the second. The attendance office calls these girls' houses and their parents freak beacuse they think they're not in school. The attendance office has been yelling at me for weeks over this. The last straw was telling me that they've never had any problems with the band and orchestra attendance. The kids who take attendace there are either a) not stupid, and actually do things correctly, or b)marking kids present when they're actually absent.

Now I have to waste class time grabbing the attendance folders out of my kids' hands to do them myself, and most likely call security to take the kids who show up late to the attendance office. We can't let the kids in late if the attendance folders have been taken away, and most of them refuse to go to the office for an admit slip. I don't want to call security - they don't have an extention, so I have no idea who I'm even supposed to call.

Here's what I would do to revamp the entire attendance system. Actually, what I'd want is to be able to enter in into a computer, but since the school's too poor to put a computer in every classroom, let alone have a fast enough network connection to have everyone enter attendance at the same time, I don't think it will happen any time soon.

1) Get rid of senior privilege. Lazy bastards. That way everyone will have to be here when school starts.

2) Get the attendance office to actually understand how the music department runs. At the beginning of the year, they'd assigned my attendance folder and my colleague's to separate classrooms (for the same class) and spent a week calling an empty room to ask me where my attendance folder was.

3) Have a 20 minute homeroom at the start of each and every day. If you show up to school late and homeroom's over, you're going to the attendance office. That's it. No gambling on going to second period and hoping that the lady hasn't taken away the folder yet. Our classes are already 48 minutes long, I think it'll be okay to take a few minutes out of each one.

4) This way, I can just mark down who's here and who's not, and have the attendance office change some of my absences to tardies if need be.

I know this is a long rant, but it's been making me really mad at work lately. I'm sick of having people in the attendance office blame me for stuff when it's really their faulty system to blame.