I’m kind of surprised, yet not surprised, by the sentiment in a lot of the comments here. A lot of people expressing not just that the form of punishment is unreasonable, but the idea of anyone being punished period for being tardy isn’t right and that it doesn’t matter.

We just have a large conversation amongst teachers at our school about how tardiness is completely ignored by our school and the effect it has on our teaching and classrooms. Our day starts at 8:50, but because tardiness has absolutely zero consequences, students will essentially arrive staggered until about 10:45am. Every three minutes, as you’re teaching, a new student arrives into the classroom and disrupts the flow of teaching. Kids walking in with bags of Chick Fil A so the class swarms like pigeons, you have to find ways to get students caught up. We’ll start 1st period with maybe half our students and the rest will filter in and they’re not college students or adults, they can’t really handle the concept of coming in late and catching up on the lesson; the ones that are disruptive in the classroom are even more likely to be because they’re not immediately in the flow of the class, they’re setting the pace and uninterested in getting caught up. It’s a huge problem, particularly in K-8 but I’d imagine early in high school as well. While I’m not sure that fining the student is the wise decision, I get the sentiment behind it and the idea, perhaps, that by doing so, you’re making it an issue for the parents and trying to encourage them to ensure their student’s timeliness. Doesn’t always work in practice, my bet would be the parents often have no clue it’s even happening until graduation time. But grade school has to develop a reasonable consequence structure for tardiness for somebody somehow, because not giving a fuck is one of a myriad of things that make teaching unnecessarily miserable at times.