By: Sam Williams [Opinion Editor]

Breaking rules is, naturally, heavily looked down upon at Marion High School. However, there is one rule that is frequently overlooked, and the problem needs to be addressed. A huge percentage of students bring gym bags, backpacks, and large purses to class every day, even though it is a clear violation of the bag rule in place at Marion High School. So why is this rule — equally as important as the others — ignored?

The Student Handbook blatantly states, “Book bags will not be allowed in the classroom.” And there’s an obvious reason: if everyone has a bag, the small teaching space that teachers are allotted will become even harder to navigate. However, the ironic thing is, although the rule is in place to help teachers, it’s the teachers that have allowed this rule to become a joke. While it should be our responsibility to follow rules, it’s ultimately the teachers duty to enforce them.

So you may be thinking, “why is this an issue if teachers don’t find a need to enforce it?” It’s an issue for two reasons: a rule is being broken and students are being treated unfairly. The former is pretty straightforward, as the school should always be attentive at enforce all rules they find necessary to implement. However the second needs some clarifying. First, some assumptions need to be made: no student wants to take unnecessary trips to his or her locker, and no student wants to be given less rights than another. That said, ignoring the rule gives benefits to the audacious students — those who don’t care about following it on their own accord — and leaves some students carrying stacks of books in their arms or taking trips to their locker between every class. This is an injustice to the students, as it’s conditioning them to only follow rules they find important and giving certain students privileges and advantages.

The question is now, “how does the problem get fixed?” Simply, teachers need to start enforcing the rule. There’s a good lesson to be learned with this issue, and that’s how to work together to solve a problem (and more specifically, to remove rules and laws that one finds unnecessary or unjust). Once all students are stripped of their book bags and have to make tedious trips to their lockers, they’ll start working to get rid of the rule. Regardless of whether or not students are eventually allowed to have book bags in the classroom is, at the moment, irrelevant. The problem now is that the status quo supports rule breaking, which Marion shouldn’t support.