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DGS students organize walkout (continued from page 1) “My mom is a teacher at Lakeview Junior High, and after this happened I talked to her ... What’s scary is that the teacher said she’s terrified for the safety of her students because she doesn’t know how she can defend them,” Burrows said. Senior Max SchmidtBailey sees the walkout as an opportunity for every student to have their voices heard. “I think it’s incredibly important that students don’t think this walkout is favoring one side politically, although it might seem like that in some aspects. Our main focus is for the protection and voices of all the students at DGS,” SchmidtBailey said. Jankowski decided to contact the administration in order to understand what the school can do. “We want to see what the maximum [teachers] can do without getting their jobs compromised. Students
can push even without the administration ... If [the administration] is not necessarily able to lead us, we definitely want to lead ourselves through this. That’s where the board comes in, with all the logistics,” Jankowski said. Principal Ed Schwartz made it clear that DGS is not endorsing or organizing any of the protests. Instead his involvement is strictly for the protection and safety of students interested in participating. “My goal is to make sure you guys are safe with whatever you do. I asked the group organizing to share some of their plans with us [the administration] so we can put things in place, so whatever they’re doing we can keep an eye on them and make sure they’re safe,” “I’m not coordinating any protests, I want you in class,” Schwartz said. Schwartz explained that leaving class for a walkout would be met with the same
consequences as leaving class unexcused for any reason. “Your punishment depends on how often you have done this kind of thing before. If you’re someone who skips class a lot, your punishment will probably be greater than someone who is just doing it for the first time,” Schwartz said. Jankowski and her colleagues have been faced with criticism via social media from some of their fellow classmates. One of the comments came from junior Latonne Gray. His tweet read, “No mames @DGSWalkout while y’all need to stop it just trying to miss a day of school. Sad.” Following the comment, Gray further explained his position on the walkout. “When I first saw [the walkout Twitter], I was kind of surprised because I didn’t know that our school would have that type of reaction ... but it wasn’t anything bad about it. I just
March 9, 2018 thought we could do a little bit more than just walk out,” Gray said. Students running the Twitter account have made an effort to reply to messages they receive, as Jankowski believes that all students should have the opportunity to have their voices heard. “We consider everything
people tweet at us. We genuinely think about it and want people to know their voices are being heard. We want to advocate for students everywhere,” Jankowski said. This is a developing story. Check our website, www. southblueprint.com for updates.
Photo courtesy of Twitter @DGSWalkout replies to junior Latonne Gray via their public Twitter page
Photo illustration by Jhenevie Oca
Students stop swiping: tardy tracking overfills detentions By Will Miller, Social Media Director
With the new addition of swipe stations at the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year, more students are facing detentions. In the past, it was up to the teacher’s discretion whether or not they decided to give a student a tardy in cooperation with the school’s policy. This year, the decision is in the hands of hall monitors stationed throughout the school. With this system in place, students that are tardy over three times or
are more than five minutes late to a class will automatically be issued one hour of detention. Students then have two weeks to serve the detention either before or after school in E238. If students neglect to serve their detention, then their hours will double until they gets to four hours. Past that, students may face an in-school suspension. If students have any hours of detention unserved at the end of the year, they will roll over to the following year. Graduating students
must serve their detentions before the end of the year in order to graduate. Part-time detention supervisor and English teacher Zachary Kuhn has seen detention attendance increase first hand. “We used to have maybe 12-18 kids show up [to detention] now in those three months there were up to 55 students some days,” Kuhn said. This increase has created new challenges for staff. It has been more difficult for supervisors to make sure that students are on task during detention.
The presence of more kids in the room enables students to try and disobey rules by looking at their phones or playing on their Chromebooks. If they are caught, this can then lead to additional detentions. For the past few months, administration has been forced to request additional staff members to supervise the students in detention. After 24 students have signed in, the detention supervisor is required to call for additional staff for safety measures. Senior Ryan Irwin has served 16 hours of deten-
tion and has about 26 hours left to serve before he is allowed to graduate this May. According to Irwin, talking to deans about when to serve these detentions has been difficult due to high capacities. “I don’t know what to do. I just want to get these detentions off my mind,” Irwin said. Bryan Heap, a dean at DGS stated that approximately 80% of students don’t serve a detention. According to Heap, most detentions consist of students that are known by name to the supervisor.