Last year, staggered dismissal became a new policy at Luther Jackson Middle School.
The new policy had students dismissed by the hallway that they were in instead of the whole school being dismissed at the same time.
Quite a bit of people were annoyed by this, but why?
Mrs. Moore, an assistant principal at Luther Jackson, had a couple things to say about implementing the policy originally.
“I met with the assistant principals and deans and security and we talked about it last year where we were having problems where students were coming together in the hallway and causing a lot of congestion, running, pushing, yelling, and causing lots of issues for people’s safety when they were leaving certain big spaces, both in the morning and the afternoon and after lunch. So we brainstormed together and came up with the idea that we would dismiss by hallways, instead of just dismissing everyone at one time so that not all 1000 students were exiting at the same time. Part of how we came up with that is at other schools that I’ve been assistant principal at and other people have been at different schools, they had done things like that and it worked well and it allowed there to be much more safer conditions for students.”
The policy should be changed, and here’s a few reasons why: One time, a student had almost missed the bus , since his hallway was called last and the hallway that he was in was very far from the nearest exit to the buses. This can be even worse if you are staying a bit longer in your class at the end of the day, like if you need to finish a test before you leave, which can be quite stressful, especially if the room you’re in is quite far from the buses.
What could happen is that instead of one hallway being called at a time, multiple hallways could be called at the same time, except that they are far away from each other. For example, since the late 400 hallways go out one exit, the late 600 hallways could be called at the same time since they don’t use the same exit. This could make the whole process take less time and let people miss the bus less.
In conclusion, the staggered dismissal is fine, but it could definitely use some changes in the future. If so, It could definitely help students miss the bus less and make dismissal take a shorter amount of time to finish.
Related Stories:
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-benefits-staggered-school-finish.html
https://sbo.nn.k12.va.us/returntolearn/doc/hybridfaq-middle.pdf
Take Action:
Student Opinions: Staggered Dismissal
Sorry, there was an error loading this poll.
