As a student of Lake Shore, new or returning, it is required that you follow the rules of the school. Due to Covid-19 the past couple of years, rules in order to prevent the spread of the virus have become more enforced than any other type of rule in the school. However, as the 2021 to 2022 school year has shifted back to becoming a more “normal” one, new rules focusing on the wellbeing of students have recently been implemented and are now being more enforced throughout the building.

Recent emails in students’ inboxes mention new rules, concerning many, as some wonder why they have been implemented. As Principal Dr. Bross explains, “Around mid winter break, I had a voluntary staff meeting on professional development day that people could come to, and we knew we were having a lot of tardy issues, a lot of attendance issues, so I asked teachers: ‘Hey, what are the problems?’ ‘How do you think we can help?’” 

The attending staff got together at this meeting and voiced their concerns.

Continuing on, Dr. Bross states, “And so one of the things that teachers brought up was that a lot of kids were being late to class because they were going to the vending machines or trying to find a vending machine that had products that they wanted, and so, we have timers on these vending machines. So, we said, ‘Hey, we could try shutting them off to see if that eliminates some of those tardy problems.’”

The vending machines are now only available to use before 8 AM and after 3 PM. 

From vending machine limitations to virtual passes, attendance issues, new hall monitors, and vaping, the staff of Lake Shore has been collaborating to create and or refine these rules. For example, at the beginning of the year, students had to use a “virtual hall pass”, which was a QR code they scanned which fills out a form indicating when a student left their classroom. This later got removed, and it has recently been announced to students that they must receive a paper pass written up by their teacher in order to be out in the halls.

Dr. Bross mentions the removal of virtual passes, stating, “It’s just easier to know if a student has permission to be in the hallway if they’re holding a paper pass as opposed to when we were using the digital pass at the beginning of the year, because any kid could say they filled out the digital pass form without no way of verifying it, where as if we asked them to have a piece of paper with them, it’s a little bit easier to sort of determine if they have actual permission from a teacher to be in the hallway or not.”

Three new faces have been seen monitoring the halls, and two returning alumni, it may seem like there have been so many new hall monitors. However, Dr. Bross clarifies, “We’ve only actually added one position, and that was this year, … We had someone at the end of last year resign, we’ve had somebody that’s been out on leave, so we finally filled those two positions, and then we added a position because we had a need for a female locker room attendant, because we don’t have a female gym teacher. So, we tied that into a new campus monitor position. So, really we’ve been working all year to get those filled so that we had a full team of campus monitors able to help us monitor all of our hallways.”

While Dr. Bross said how student misbehavior has not gotten worse the past 15 years, she explained that the ways one misbehaves is definitely different than it was before. Many teachers of Lake Shore can agree, as students are always changing. That being said, the amount of students vaping in Macomb County schools has increased a lot in the past five years. At one point in this school year, the school was averaging over five vaping tickets a week. This is because of the increase of students bringing contraband to school along with the hall monitors and other staff cracking down on this issue.

Although not new this year, punishments for getting caught vaping are as follows: the student will receive a suspension from school and a $500 ticket from the Saint Clair Shores Police Department. The $500 ticket ordinance was passed during the 2020 to 2021 school year. 

All of these now more enforced rules are intended to benefit the student.

Dr. Bross sympathizes, saying, “We never want this school to feel like a prison, we don’t want kids to feel like we’re, you know- kind of coming down on them, but at the same time we have 1,000 kids and 100 adults so we need to work really hard to make sure everyone’s following the rules and expectations so that things don’t get out of control here.”

She concludes by saying, “So really our main goal with all of our policies and procedures is to create a campus that makes kids more successful. We know that kids are more successful when they are in class, when they’re on time, when they’re not skipping their class, so we went to the teachers who were feeling frustrated with the amount of tardies and absences and we’re trying to sort of, yeah, ‘tighten things up’ so that kids know the expectations and it is easier for us to hold them accountable for being in the classroom when they need to be in the classroom.”