On a lovely Friday morning, my group which consisted of, Connor Hurst, Dylan Long, Josie Muckerman, and Riley Kennedy, interviewed three of the top school staff. Brad Ross, Eric Alderson, and Kevin Fowler allowed us to ask them questions about the policies for the 2022-2023 school year. Here are some changes to the school policies that they have cleared up for us. 

While interviewing Brad Ross, we asked him about the PDA (public displays of affection) policy He said (“Public displays of affection are an offense and they’re just like, it’s not really a one of our more common ones like disruption or insubordination, or inappropriate communications, things like that. We see a lot of those.”) He says although they are not common, this is how they handle them.  

This is when students are kissing and hugging in the hallways. (“You know, I’d stand there and sometimes make a joke, you know, like, ‘you guys will see each other again, that will be okay. You know, he’s, he’s not going off to war,’ you know, that sort of thing.”) Fortunately, he says it’s not as common as insubordination or inappropriate communications. 

We have asked Fowler and Alderson about the tardy policy. With Fowler, we more asked about how tardiness would affect athletes. He says that athletes are held to a different standard. (“The expectation is they’re here every day from start to finish, meaning being on time so you know, in my mind, the only thing that couldn’t have would be a negative impact as far as it actually hurting students that aren’t getting there, but that’s on them. So, you know, depends on how you look at it. It could be a positive impact as though it gets kids here on time that maybe wouldn’t because they’re involved.”)

There were concerns about work interfering with athletics. This is what Fowler had to say about it. (“How can you be involved, not be there. Not fair to the other kids as well. Like, what if you’re super athletic and you’re very good players. Let’s face it, there’s some kids that that’s their talent, athletic wear athletically gifted, they could show up one day a week and still be better than the person that’s there every single day, putting in the time well, it’s high school athletics. Is that really fair? I think most people would say that it’s not really fair.”)

We also asked Alderson about the tardy policy. He says many teachers are happy with this. He also says he doesn’t know if it was a big change or not. Many think that the change was unreasonable. It used to be if you had certain amount of tardies in one day, now it’s how much tardies you get throughout the day. This is his opinion on the change. (“We make parent phone calls, we let them know what’s going on. I think seven is that’s a lot of tardies. I’m saying so to get one detention for seven tardies, I think is very reasonable and so it just goes mathematically that way 7, 14, 21 and so on, so forth.”)

We also asked Alderson about the dress code policy. He says it’s a three step process. The student is first asked to cover up. But if there are other occasions where it’s extreme, the student could risk OSS. But he says he does not want to go that route.