There’s been a pattern of students being late that has appeared in the 25’-26’ school year. Despite encouragement from administrators for students to show up on time, the trend of lhas still continued. But why is this? Is there a specific day or scheduled day which students avoid? Is traffic too heavy? Are weather conditions too poor and obstructing? Are students oversleeping? Skipping the first period due to study hall or a test they want to avoid? Or do students just not feel like showing up to school on time? These are some of the questions we aimed to answer with our collected data for our investigational study.
After surveying 55 students of varying grades, it was predicted that:
- Most students were late on Mondays
- Most students were late on Day 4’s
However, after attendance data analysis, this was found not to be the case.
Over the span of three weeks, we collected multiple valuable pieces of data which applied to our area of research. As shown in the provided figures further down, we collected the amount of lates for each grade from September 5th (the second day of school) up until April 17th, the weekday each day was, and the scheduled day each day was. In addition to this, we identified the values of each class size and the percentage of lates in relation to the class size.
According to the data, it turns out that every class hadn’t been the most late on Mondays or Day 4s as predicted by a student survey (shown further below), but instead, lates most commonly occurred on Tuesdays and Day 2s. In fact:
- For Day 2’s, ~ 34 freshmen, 35 sophomores, 48 juniors, and 88 seniors were late on average from Sept.-Apr., which were the largest averages.
- For Tuesdays, ~ 34 freshmen, 35 sophomores, 48 juniors, and 85 seniors were late on average from Sept.-Apr.,
- January 20th (a Tuesday and Day 2) was the day with the most tardies, with 396 students absent in total,
- 124 of those students were seniors.
- This large accumulation of lates was most likely due to the weather, as temperatures were cold and roads were probably icy.
- This day was also the max. number of lates for freshmen (80), juniors (116), and seniors.
- The maximum number of lates for sophomores (77) was a week later, January 27th, a Tuesday and Day 1.
Though the maximum number of seniors late in a given day was 124 students as per the data, the lates for other days begin to near that number. On average, 24% of the senior class is late. Despite the possibility of a skew in percentage due to some of these tardies being from study hall periods (which is undisputable given the difference of lates), there are still a great number of lates, much more significant than the other grades, even after subtracting the amount of seniors that may be in one single study hall period.
Wayne Hills Seniors Keya Patel and Skyler Maxwell had similar views on being late to school. Keya is almost never late, while Skyler states that she is “only late when she has study hall,” as a considerable amount of seniors are. When asked if it’s hard to come to school in the mornings, both nodded and said “sometimes.” However, despite the challenge, both students show up to school.
Besides seniors, 13.2% of juniors are tardy, 10% of sophomores are tardy, and 8% of freshmen are tardy. This means that seniors are tardy 3 times the rate in which freshmen are tardy, and that lates increase by grade level, a notable leap occurring from junior to senior year. While some of these lates are attributed to study halls, it still remains a question as to why rates have increased for the lates of each grade.
