Pride Time is Pitman’s approach to extra help, right before lunch and right after your third period class. While there may not be any issues with Pride Time, The Pit is a big issue at Pitman. The Pit is the class you’re automatically assigned to if you haven’t signed up for a Pride Time class by 9:45 AM.
The Pit is supposed to be a punishment. It never failed to be a punishment. Per The Pit’s policy sheet, after attending once you will receive a verbal warning along with a forced digital quiz to help the student understand the policies of The Pit. Attending twice lands you a parent notification, attending for a third time lands you a parent conference, and attending for the fourth time lands you detention and a mandatory parent meeting. Anything after that is decided by administration.
Your attendance resets at the beginning of every quarter, so nobody should get exceedingly high punishments.
The issue that lies is around how The Pit works. Students arrive and are not allowed to do schoolwork. They are not allowed to use their laptops. Phones and any personal devices must be put away. You are not allowed to talk to other students. You can only sit straight and stare, for 40 minutes.
Every Pit visit essentially brings you two punishments, as well as a waste of 40 essential minutes. Students are blamed for not signing up to Pride Time, but this isn’t always the case.
At the beginning of the school day on an average day in November, out of 92 available classes to sign up for, 23 Pride Time classes required you to have the class in order to sign up (student only), four classes were retakes/reteaches only, and only about four classes were study halls available to everyone. In other words, this means 4.3% of Pride Time classes are available for everyone, and 25% required you to be in the class in order to schedule, and the rest didn’t require you to be in the class, but were support and enrichment classes, meaning you’re not entitled to joining.
This is where you notice that it’s not always the students’ fault for entering The Pit.
Teachers may reject students for not being in the appropriate class, may change their class to accommodate a specific advanced class they have, or maybe you requested a class, pending approval, and didn’t get in, and now it’s too late to change your class. The only option from there is The Pit.
In a world where mental health matters most, The Pit is not right for any student and is an easy way to stress out students faster. When school is already considered a prison to some students, this is not a good way to approach punishments at all. Nobody wants to be in there whether they hand out punishments or not.
An alternative for this issue is just replacing The Pit with their Pride Support class in the Cafeteria, since they’re both separated into the same room and are nearly identical, removing the punishment aspect. The issue with this is that nobody will be in a rush to sign up for Pride Time and will result in overfiling, so they’d have to keep the strike system in place.