About 10-15 MTHS students came to school late to protest administration’s recent practice of scanning the ID cards of students who are late to school at the front door. They were planning to cause a jam of student traffic at the door, but when they arrived, not a single student was carded.

The protest was started organized through an event on Facebook called “Come To School Late” which had over 130 MTHS students saying they planned on attending or might attend.

“I’m really disappointed because I had about 100 people [say they were attending] and only about 10 people showed up,” senior Jordan McKinney said. McKinney created the event on Facebook.

When the students who were participating showed up and entered the front door, they were greeted with high-fives from ASB representatives and holiday music blasting on a stereo.

“It looks like administration knew, so someone blabbed,” McKinney said.

When assistant principal Peter Schurke was asked if he knew ahead of time about the protest, he replied: “No.”

“We don’t necessarily scan every day and this morning we decided that we weren’t going to scan; we were going to trust students to be on time,” Schurke said.

Administrators have been scanning the barcode on the ID card of late students for the past month in an effort to reduce the amount of students coming into school after 7:20 a.m.

“We were standing here watching incredibly huge numbers of students walking through the door after the tardy bell had rung,” Schurke said. “The numbers of students coming in the building [late] were just so huge that we decided we had to do something.”

Mixed reactions toward administration’s attempt to reduce student tardiness

“This is simply to promote awareness that we want students to be in class.”

Eliminating the morning tutorial time at the beginning of the year has led to most students arriving within the same 20 minute period, thus increasing traffic.

“We’ve been working with the city planner to try and work on the traffic patterns,” Schurke also stated. “[Also to] improve the traffic flow into the school.”

Whether they showed up or not, about 10 percent of the student population joined the event on Facebook which implies that administrators still have some convincing to do.

“I wanted to start to bring awareness about all these ridiculous rules that have been started this year,” McKinney said.