Day in the Life – “A Typical Day”

Thinking about what a typical day is like is somewhat difficult to describe. Within the role (at least at the high school I worked at) there are typical weeks. We rotated every week into different roles or positions. Some of the locations were related just located in different areas. Each area had some responsibilities that varied.

Here is my attempted to try and give a typical day:

• 7:00am – Report/Clock in (our earliest time to report is 6am) Get your radio and other supplies for your area.
• 7:05am – Report to assigned position. Students started coming in at 6:50am or so. The biggest gathering locations for students was the café. Breakfast served! The second largest location was the main hallway and the E wing area (largest area of open space).
• 7:20am – Move up to you block position. Block is a simple process of ensuring the students that are late – go to the attendance area to receive a pass to go to class.
• 7:25am – Block all late students and have them line up for passes. This would go on until the line goes down. If you look at this as a percentage of the students that are enrolled – it was rather low (about 2% on normal days).
• 7:35am – Back to your assigned area. You would first walk your assigned area to insure that there were teachers in classes, no students just hanging out in the hallway and perform bathroom checks.
• Period 1 – Stay in your area and continue to perform bathroom and hallway observations. Asked students that in the hall to see their pass. No pass – ask where they are going, where did you come from. Do this until the bell rings.
• Passing period – Be in position where you can observe students going to their next class. Some of the students will gather in the hallways and hang out until the first bell rings (5 minutes). Just before that bell, I would be calling out that it is time to get to class. Once the bell rang – I would call out that they have 1 min before the late bell. We would have plenty of students that were late… I would see 100 or more students coming late to their next class.
• Period 2 and 3 with passing periods – we repeated what was just like period 1 and that passing period.
• Period 4 – Was lunch time! Report to assigned lunch time area (café, patio, main hallway, or front door). Again each area has definite responsibilities. The main one was to keep order and security for the students. Security had 3 lunch periods to perform our duties.
  • Lunch A – was mostly the freshman class and some sophomores. This lunch was our busiest lunch for staying on observant. Those students are high energy all the time.
  • Lunch B – most sophomores and juniors. This lunch was busy while the students were getting their lunch, but after that they were busy eating and playing on their phones. They have a year under their belt. More matured.
  • Lunch C – mostly juniors and some seniors. Well, that was a welcome sight. Pretty much low energy the whole time. That is the time that we had to get to know the students better.
• Period 5 and 6 with the passing periods – Same stuff as written in period 1.
• End of Period 6 – most of the students leave campus. Their day is done. Some would have bus duty to insure that all students are on the buses. Some would have parking lot duty to insure that we have safe passage out of the parking lots. Most would stay in the area! Usually after 10 minutes we are ensuring that those students that are still wondering the halls – have a pass to go to a teach for tutoring, admin or wherever. No pass – time to go home!
• Period 7 was filled with much of the same (just a lot less students).
• 3:15pm – end of the school day. Move to your next assigned responsibility. Making sure that those that have a place to go (tutoring, clubs or meeting with whoever) have passes. No pass – time to leave. Our patio was the area for late bus… The rest of the school was to be student free as possible.
• 3:30pm – Clock out. Your day is done (well, if you have to cover sports or any other activity – you still clock out and record your time to a paper OT accounting process.
• Once your game or activity is over we are still there until most, if not all, have left the activity. With sports we mainly stay until the visiting team has loaded up and left the campus. Other activities – we pretty much wait 20 mins and the we started moving them to the doors. We wait to see if every student has a ride! Then we can go home.
  • Football Friday’s were the longest day! Come in 7am worked your shift until 3:30pm. Then OT from 3:30pm until somewhere around 10:30/11pm.

Remember this typical day is without incidents. No fights, bathroom smoking, calls from teachers for assistance with a student(s), disrespectful students or dress codes to attend too.