September 2005
 
Skipping assemblies has been a sad tradition at Novi High School for a long time; it has been popular for all of my years at NHS. While personally I boast that I have attended every assembly in my high school career, I admit that I have been tempted to skip assemblies.

It’s a consensus that the fall, winter and spring recognition assemblies are more boring than class; even some outspoken faculty members admit they loathe attending them. In my three years there have been a number of attempts at stopping students from skipping assemblies. Some have been more successful than others.

Moving assemblies from the very end of the day to the middle of the day makes it trickier to skip an assembly if a student actually does care about his/her schoolwork, but it’s still doable. Posting hall moms at each and every exit also has been successful at stopping the exodus of students. But still there is one thing those hall moms can’t stop, and it’s not the offensive line of the football team. It’s those who have the holy grail of assembly days: a pass.

In the past a pass meant a parent had called into the school and given some sort of excuse, usually a doctor appointment that directly coincides with the time of the assembly, to get them out of class. Literately hundreds of passes would be written every day that had an assembly, and their delivery was a much-anticipated event.

Those days, the administration believes, are over. That’s because for the first time in the history of NHS, there is a complex and comprehensive attendance policy. A parent calling their child into the automated phone number to give an excuse will no longer be tolerated, at least after it’s happened ten times.

The new policy calls for no more than 10 excused or unexcused absence every year for each student. An excused absence is defined as illness verified by parent, a pre-arranged family vacation or a student leaving class 15 minutes early/getting to class 15 minutes late with permission. After 5 unexcused absences or 10 total absences, a student will forfeit credit for the class.

While there are absences that don’t count toward the limit of ten, those scenarios are legitimate. They include doctor appointments, funerals, hospitalization etc.

When the details of the plan where unfurled for all those at registration to see, there were plenty of moans and groans. The idea of playing hooky now had just become much more risky. After all, the vast majority of students at NHS, whether they openly admit it or not, really do care about their grades, and definitely don’t want to get an “E” instead of an “A” for a class.

In looking about at my first INHS article, I realize a pattern of change at our school: the administration is getting tougher on students, in a good way.

Much of the snickering about getting around flimsy rules that was previously heard in the halls of NHS will now be silenced. It’s unpopular, especially as a teenager, to agree with tougher rules. Especially to agree with rules that admittedly makes life as a Wildcat much more like a job. But isn’t high school supposed to train us for the “real world”?

That’s the debate that NHS students will have for years to come, and in the end I hope they will grudgingly come to the conclusion that the change is for the better.