My daughter and I always know when we’re late for school when the father of the girl upstairs is entering the building just as we’re leaving.

When we’re extrmely late, we see the coffee clatch, the group of parents who sit at the Mojo until 9:30 or so discussing the state of the world – both local and geo-political.  That’s when we really have to pick up speed and pray that the
Assistant Principal isn’t handing out late passes just yet.

It’s embarassing to be late as often as we are because we live right around the corner from the school. Lately, PS 321 has gotten very agressive about penalizing lateness. "We keep getting calls from downtown," said one of the office ladies to me the other day. "They think our latenesses are excessive. They wanna know what’s going on."

In other words, late kids are bad for the school. It’s also not
condusive to the smooth running of the classroom. That’s what the
teachers always say, anyway. Understandably, it’s quite distracting
when kids stream into class between 8:45 and 9 a.m, when the teacher is
trying to do "Morning Meeting" or get started on the first lesson of
the day.

Back in the day when my teenage son attended PS 321, you’d get a plastic late pass from one of the office ladies, those lovable, slightly gruff women who sit behind the counter in the administration office. It wasn’t such a big deal then. A pain in the neck, yes. But I don’t think it went on any permanent records.  Now, the school is giving out late passes printed in triplicate and it is going on the child’s record, the record that determines where the child goes for middle school.

It seems that the middle schools take a close look at lateness and view excessive lateness as criteria for not accepting a child to their school.  Yeesh. Lateness is serious! Or: punctuality is serious business. As the office lady said, "What would you think of a teacher who walked in 10, 15 minutes late every day? What kind of review would he or she get?"

Point taken. Those office ladies have an admirably pragmatic approach to things.

I take some of the blame for my daughter’s lateness. She’s really hard to wake up and likes to linger in bed in the morning. We should probably wake her up earlier and force her to select her outfit the night before. She changes her mind about what she wants to wear three, four times in the morning, her bedroom floor a moutain of clothing rejections. It can be quite exasperating.

That said, we have been making a big effort to avoid tardyness. Today, when we saw the father of the girl who lives upstairs my daughter said, "We haven’t been seeing him that much lately. I guess we’ve been getting there on time."