You really shouldn’t have waited until Homecoming week to clear your detentions. If you were smart, you would have served the detention the day you got it. But you didn’t. And now you’re here, with three detentions and a guilty conscience.

It makes sense to me why detentions exist. If you’re fooling around in class, or disrespecting the teacher, you should be given detention.

But a majority of detentions are not, in fact, due to laziness or rudeness in the classroom. They’re due to our parents, siblings, and even ourselves.

You finish your homework at 11:46 p.m. You calculate you’ll get around six hours of sleep if you go directly to bed and don’t check Twitter.

Before you know it, it’s 7:15 a.m. and you’re either not even out of bed yet, let alone ready to walk out the door, or you’re trying to convince your parents that today would be a really good day not to be late.

As a result, you get to school at 7:50 a.m. Not even 10 minutes late, now you have detention. And if you’re like me, this scenario happens quite often and now you have three detentions to clear in the next negative two days, or you can’t go to Homecoming.

If you’re not in the same boat as me, congratulations: you actually have your life together and I’m quite jealous.

It absolutely does not make sense why we, the students, should be given detention for a small tardy. If you miss first block entirely, by all means, you should get a tardy. But to miss 10 minutes and be given an hour long detention to clear, in which you can’t sleep, talk, or even use your phone? It’s insane.

Granted, the lunch detention is a better deal. Just stay in from 12:42 to 1:12 p.m. and you get credited for an hour even though you only served 30 minutes. Other than lunch, you either serve 40 minutes before school, or an hour after school.

If I could, I would do away with all detentions. They come from the depths of hell themselves and it’s utterly and completely unfair to students to punish them for an unintentional tardy. The only times you can serve them are before school, during lunch, after school, or during an off period. These times are not only inconvenient, sometimes they’re impossible to get to. For instance, if a student finds it near impossible to get to school on time, how on earth are they going to make it before school? And if they’re clearing essentials in a class that happens to carry through lunch, then they’re only left with after school to serve detention. And if they take the bus, that’s out too.

Being late is a problem, but it’s not so much of a problem that the school should be issuing detentions. It would be much more beneficial for our school as well as our students if instead of punishing for lateness, the school rewarded students for being on time. For example, if students were consistently on time to their classes for an entire month, they could earn a free dance ticket, or something of the like.

In the lunch detention today, I was among 59 other students serving detentions. One student even had five to clear before Saturday’s Homecoming dance, and she said they were all because she was running late.

I highly doubt students wake up and think to themselves ‘You know what, I think I’ll be late to school today because school can’t control me, I’ll show them by being five minutes late and absolutely nothing wrong could happen.’

So now, you’re stuck. Your parents can only clear two of the dang things a semester, which might work if you’re only late twice a semester, but for the other 80 percent of the school, only being able to clear two tardies is barely anything to be thankful for.

And to top it all off, if you buy your tickets tomorrow, you’re penalized for being late again by having to pay $20 instead of $10 if you have ASB and $15 if you don’t. As if the ASB dance committee really needs that extra money. I’m sure they could find it in the niceness of their hearts to just waive that extra fee to those of us who are trying desperately to clear our detentions before time runs out.

Editor’s note: The comment written about the ASB dance committee was not meant to be derogatory, hurtful, or demeaning to them in any way. Every single dance has been extremely enjoyable and the amount of work the ASB dance committee puts into the dances is amazing. The comment about the cost of the dance tickets was meant to shed light on the fact that not serving detentions can cause people to have to pay a higher price dance ticket, not meant as an inflammatory remark towards the dance committee itself. This was written and meant to be read as an opinion piece about detentions, not intended as an attack toward any person(s) on campus.

by HARMONY REILLY