The average border crossing time is six minutes to check passports and declare items, but somehow EHS manages to take longer checking students into the building if they walk in late.

As EHS transitions into the second semester of the year, administration has made a couple of changes to “enhance” the building’s security and make sure people are where they are supposed to be.

One of the new changes this semester is how the school handles tardies. If you walk in right after the final bell, you get to waste more time waiting in a long line to get checked in.

If you happen to just arrive at school at 7:15 a.m., you wouldn’t miss much of class because of the announcements. Now, you get to waste 10 minutes of class waiting in a line for a piece of paper that goes into the recycling bin. It’s a complete waste of time and paper.

Administration made the change to make sure tardies are enforced, but things happen. The parent drop-off lane is insane in the mornings, and teachers would sometimes be understanding if you were walking in a minute late.

Now, have fun with that. There are staff who guard the line into the building to make sure people aren’t “sneaking through.” It has basically turned into border patrol, but somehow worse.

Another change this semester is the addition of actual hall passes, which is another absolute waste of resources.

Instead of just asking to go to the bathroom, and usually signing something on a clipboard for a teachers record, students need this obscenely bright orange pass that requires a teacher’s signature.

Most teachers just give the student the pass and they fill it out and the teacher just quickly signs it, which is a good way around the dumb solution. In other cases, like I saw in study hall, they laminate a pre-signed hall pass so they aren’t wasted.

By the end of the year, I don’t think the hall passes are still going to be enforced. Like most things that are brought in, they die out quickly because it’s too much of a hassle to keep going.

Teachers will quickly run out of hall passes and the school will take a long time to replenish them, as per usual. The line to get in the building late will continue to stay at around the 90-student mark and not change as detentions quickly full up. It’s just inevitable.

First semester didn’t seem to have these problems before. Teachers didn’t care if I had to use the bathroom or if I was a minute late to first hour because of traffic. Students were fine how it was, and it seems like an unnecessary change.