Archbishop Riordan High School has seen its fair share of changes over the years, including a modified schedule, a new cafeteria along with a new food company, and a new counseling wing. While these changes have been good for Riordan as a whole, the school continues to face one major problem every day: crowded hallways with bad decorum.
Currently, Riordan is the largest it has ever been, having more than 1,000 students. With this growth, the obvious issue of crowded hallways has arisen.
With these crowded hallways, poor decorum from students causes traffic while walking from class to class or class to lunch, and is present through multiple factors.
Firstly, students stop in the middle of the hallway to talk to their friends. Not only does this create a blockage behind that person and their friends, it forces people to go around them which leads to even more traffic.
Additionally, students check their phone in the middle of the hallway, either stopping where they are or not looking at where they are going. This creates traffic, and someone could be hit if that person isn’t looking at where they are walking.
Furthermore, most students walk on the side of the hallway that they aren’t supposed to. Following proper decorum, students should always walk on the right side. However, some walk to their left whether they’re going down the stairs or walking through a hallway. This affects people coming from the opposite side who are squished into one tight corner, which leads to an even greater amount of traffic.
With the increased blockage and traffic, the issue of hygiene becomes more prevalent. For the people who don’t wear deodorant or shower, the smell becomes more obvious in the hallways, especially when it’s jam packed. Wearing deodorant is something simple that takes under 20 seconds while a shower at most takes 10 minutes.
Overall, the entire school community can benefit if they work together on addressing the self-caused issues. These steps aren’t difficult to implement and if they are, the hallways will be a much more open place for the Riordan community again.
