By Bianca I. Mena
“Quickstart” was a misleading name to the registration for school this year. Several Lane students referred to it instead as “slowstart” or “longstart.”
Several Facebook statuses criticized the long lines and long waits at Quickstart the week before the start of the school year.
One status read, “Quicker start? There wasn’t even a ‘quick’ start.”
Another complained, “It took two hours to get out of the lunchroom.”
Although registration for school has long been a time-consuming process, many students found that this year, in particular, was too long of a wait.
“I was there for four hours,” said Mitchell Le, Div 465. “I got there around 11:30 in the morning and my scheduled time [to start] was 12:45.”
Despite Le’s early arrival, he did not finish all the steps of registation until nearly 4 pm, when the crowds thinned and the process sped up.
“Turning in money and receiving my schedule and books was a smooth process of about 30 minutes,” Le said. “Virtually no one was in the hallways.”
Kayla Scanlan, Div. 587, reported that the waiting was the hardest part.
“The process didn’t take long, but waiting to do each process did,” she said. “I didn’t understand that.”
Jacqueline Puschmann, Div. 462, waited so long she missed her evening flight out of O’Hare.
“I was supposed to fly to Boston [the day of Quickstart],” Puschmann said. “I got [to school] at 12:30pm and I left at five. I was supposed to be at the airport at six and the flight itself was at seven. By the time I [finished with Quickstart], my mom figured I would just have to fly the next day.”
Puschmann, who says she waited for three hours with about 250 other students in the lunchroom, reported seeing some students cut lines and was disappointed more authority figures were not present to help govern the process.
Administrators pointed to technology failures in explaining the delays.
“Quickstart has never been a fast process,” said Mrs. Thompson, assistant principal. “The one thing that we tried getting into place, is setting up the payment system online. We started working on that towards the end of last winter. We were promised that the system would be ready for us, but it wasn’t.”
Getting the payment system up and running online is a step Thompson hopes will be completed in time for next school year to streamline the Quickstart process.
Mr. Wendorf, the attendance coordinator, tried to see the lighter side of the long waits at Quickstart, describing the process as something many teenagers can relate to.
“It’s like going to Great America,” Wendorf said. “The ride is short but the lines take forever.”
