Ahh, Saturday. Finally a day of leisure and rest. No ridiculously boring lectures, no time consuming homework, just free time. Well, not to pop your proverbial bubble, but it’s not like that for all of us.

Saturday detentions are arguably the worst thing to happen to school discipline since parochial education in the 60s. A Saturday DT consists of at least two excruciatingly boring hours of forced studying. You cannot eat, drink, talk or visit and don’t even think about sleeping. You get looked at funny if you blink. No one cares that it is 6:30 a.m. and you just rolled yourself out of bed five minutes ago. Just sit down and shut up.

Despite how appealing this all is to you, you decide to take a leave of absence Saturday morning. That is not a smart move. You just handed yourself an additional Saturday and a lovely in-school suspension. But don’t you fret. The Smoke Signal went one-on-one with North Campus assistant principal Mr. Nejedlo to get some answers.

According to Nejedlo, Saturday DTs get more and more prevalent as the year progresses. Right now, North Campus is issuing about 30 Saturdays weekly. Most of those are from class skipping and chronic tardies. Occasionally, Nejedlo will come across a first time offender.

“A few kids cry," he said. "Usually they are just trying to get themselves out of trouble, but some are genuinely embarrassed.” A note to the criers--discipline records aren’t shipped to your college of choice.

“Saturdays aren’t on a permanent record of any kind," he said. "All discipline records go in the shredder after graduation.” Still scared? It’s probably because you’ve seen Nejedlo strolling through the halls looking for the accused.

“We hand out about 6 or 7 Saturdays a day,” he said. With numbers like that it seems everyone is bound to get a Saturday sometime in their high school career, but many escape the inevitable. Others, like junior Jamie Holzli, are not so lucky.

“I have had one Saturday so far this year,” she said. “Last year I had 29. I know exactly how many tiles are on ceiling of the study hall room.” Now that is impressive. BUT 29 SATURDAY DETENTIONS? How can that be?

“Well basically I get detentions because I am one bad apple,” Holzli explained. "I wrote on Mr. Kemble’s neck once. And I skipped a lot of study halls,” she said. With that attitude its no wonder students are spending their Saturday mornings at school. What else can the administration do?

“Instead of detentions we should all go to jail on Saturday morning and sit with the real bad apples,” Holzli explained. “That’ll teach us.”