Opinion Article

Why detention at Rocky Mountain is unfair?

Detention at Rocky Mountain is something that hasn’t been at the school for long. During the second semester of the 2021-22 school year the Rocky Mountain staff implemented school suspension, after school detention, and lunch detention. Ever since then people have been complaining about detention and how unfair it is. Having to go to detention just because you were late to a class has been annoying for a lot of people and those people think the detention rules should be changed.

I believe that people at Rocky shouldn’t have to pay to get out of detention. I believe that the only way people should be able to get out of It is through serving time. Paying to get out seems kind of corrupt to me and I think other people would agree with me. What is the money being used for? Who is keeping all the money? These are the things that we need to know. If we are paying for something I feel like we should be obligated to know where that money or who that money is going to.

Another thing I don’t like about the detention is the fact that this year they haven’t been telling people how much detention time they have. I had to go to the SRO to find out how much time I had. I only had 50 minutes of detention time but regardless I think they should send out notes to people telling them how much time they have, instead of having people find out by themselves. Imagine if I didn’t know that then I wouldn’t be able to get credit for the classes I took. This is because whenever you have detention time at the end of the semester then you get a No credit (NC) for the classes you have time in. I wouldn’t have a problem with this if the school told us the amount of time we have without having to ask them.

Vice Principal, Mr. Smith gave me a different perspective on why detention has been changed to benefit the school. Principal Smith said, “tardies are in place so that kids know that they ha

ve to get to school on time.” I agree with what he is saying here because if students aren’t showing up to school then something needs to change to make sure they do show up on time. Mr. Smith also said, “if you are tardy you can clear at anytime…but we have to put something in place to remind people to come to school on time.” This is a different perspective that I didn’t really think about when talking about this topic. At the end of the day school staff are trying their best to have kids in school and being tardy isn’t helping with that.

Detention is something that should have been in place at this school a long time ago. 2 years ago you could walk into your class 10 minutes late and not get tardy. Now whenever you walk in even a second late you get marked tardy and have to serve time for that. Once again I don’t have any issue with giving out detention time, but I do have an issue with the consequences of not serving it. You could have a 4.0 GPA but if you had 10 minutes of detention time that are unserved then you will get a No credit (NC) on your transcript for all the classes you took that semester. Which means that you will have to retake these classes later down the line. So you basically wasted a whole semester of going to school for nothing.