By now the news of the gym absence policy has reached the ears of all warren students and families. However, can these policies be justified? Various students are aware of their peers skipping gym just to escape the horror of physical activity, but can it be justified that ALL students be punished for these individuals? 

Everyone immediately jumps to assume that every student HAS to make it up, and that they have to run for miles and miles, and have it uninterrupted! Or that they even have to do push ups. Various gym teachers have told me that this was approved by the administration back in April of 2024. One gym teacher clarified that the new gym policy states that if a student is absent during gym, excused or not, they have the opportunity to make up the day missed with running or walking on a treadmeal, elliptical, or bicycle. Even if a student were to have an appointment of some kind of be sick for the day, the death of a family member, they will lose points for that day. Various Warren students and parents find all of it stupid, but if you look at it from the other side it can make sense.

In other classes you have to make up the work with physical paper or a canvas assignment that you can get help for from various places: twilight study tables, after school study tables, a resource room, or from the teacher directly. However gym classes aren’t based off of solid information and formulas; they are based on participation and activity. The issue with the gym make ups is that you only are able to do it physically on Tuesday or Thursday after school from 2:30-3:00. You could leave earlier, but that’s only if you run 2 miles on the treadmill before 3:00. If you don’t then you can walk, bike, or use an elliptical for 30 minutes. A gym teacher says that again- it is NOT mandatory; but concerned students can’t help but want to fix this grade. The thing that students are forgetting is that at first this will bring your grade down, because there are so little grades in the gradebook. In the future towards the end of the semester you could have around 70 more grades that bury those few zeros in the gradebook. Gym teachers say that you can miss around 7-8 in order to pass the class, and again, that it’s NOT mandatory.

The problem with this is, if the absence is excused, what about students who don’t have the time? There are active Warren students who take more than 5 clubs at Warren, while taking classes! Other students have a schedule with work, how are they supposed to suddenly make up the gym class when they have a job? Or students who have younger siblings to take care of after school, is their family going to have to take the hit along with their grade? The late policy doesn’t just target people’s grades, but also their time and family, forcing them to change their time for the class. What’s even worse is what if a family member passes and they can’t attend school? Do they have to make it up?

A Gym Teacher says this issue was already solved by ‘banking’ points. They said that if you know you won’t show up later in the semester, that you can make it up earlier and use the points you earned on one of the make up days to cover what you missed. Plus, they said that these points can be made up during finals.

So, let’s say if we were to get rid of this policy, would we just return to the the old policy and merely excuse it? This all varies based on what the PE apartment decides; however, it is something that can be negotiated. Rather than having students devote their time at school, they can do it during a study hall or lunch. Better yet, they can get a physical, or digital assignment done on canvas that they can do at home and get help with from a gym teacher. It could be just a canvas assignment, note taking, an edpuzzle- anything done from home. If gym teachers are worried that student will take advantage of this, they can also offer community service, something students would rather devote their time to something while being active. The school would be helping senior and disabled communities by assigning yard work to these students. A school in Iowa has already implemented this and parents are ecstatic about it, not only by getting kids active, but also allowing them to help their community. Again, both these options have downsides. For one, gym class isn’t about paperwork or learning a skill, and students can easily have a friend do it for them if they’re unwilling. As for community service, it would be nice to help the community, it’s just hard to find supervising for such activities with plenty of teachers being parents themselves and having a life just like we do outside of school. Yet the point of these ideas is to give options, maybe there is a student who would love to make it up by running, but not everyone is capable of it; thus being solved with more options to make this up and get help for it. A gym teacher said something briefly about the opening of more opportunities in October of options to make up gym days that exclude cardio. That though, we will have to wait and see for.

So, are these gym teachers really justified? They can be, for taking our health in consideration, or maybe they can’t. That’s something we students have to decide ourselves.