BY RILEY VRADENBURG (‘18)

Mr. Carpenter, the assistant principal, has the worst reputation among students and does not get enough credit for his challenging job. In his job description, Mr. Carpenter is mainly in charge of student discipline and working closely with the students at school; however, he also works on the organization of testing, teacher evaluations and much more.

Carpenter might seems like the bad guy when students are getting in trouble, but he is doing his job and looking out for the best interests of students. This is his job, and students say that assistant principals in the past have not been as strict as Mr. Carpenter; however, every assistant principal in the past has applied the school handbook in the same way. Perhaps Mr. Carpenter has a harder job than those in the past because drugs and misbehaving has become more popular among the student body.

Many students do not like Mr. Carpenter simply because they allow the most popular opinion of the student body form their opinion. The only students who really have something against him are is the students who are breaking many rules.

Without Mr. Carpenter, the student body would have no checks on behavior and could essentially do whatever they wanted. This would be chaos. The entire school could not function without any discipline enforcements.

When only seeing the discipline aspect of his job, students tend to have a stale reaction to his name. However, Mr. Carpenter has done so many nice things for so many people in this school.

He has opened numerous lockers when they’re jammed. Freshman always have to have their locker unlocked at some point. Mr. Carpenter is typically willing to do it, unless he is in the middle of a more intense task.

He has done multiple favors for students. For example, this year in Government, I was in charge of a presentation on the Fourth Amendment. Mr. Carpenter was more than willing to speak in my class about how these rights apply in the school atmosphere. This was very helpful and my class learned a lot from what he had to say.

Mr. Carpenter is a fantastic math teacher who used to teach at Granville for many years before becoming assistant principal. When stepping in for a math teacher, he tries to the best of his ability to answer any questions or explain concepts. This is very helpful because we have all had a substitute teacher who has no idea about the subject at hand. Having someone around that is no longer a math teacher, but is experienced in math, is sometimes refreshing.

I believe that we should reconsider how they treat Mr. Carpenter. He cares about everyone’s well being and is only disciplining based on the school handbook. If we would think before acting, there would be less discipline. We should not allow others opinions to form our own.

I challenge everyone to get to know him, and form your own opinion on Mr. Carpenter. If you get yourself past all of the negative words surrounding his name, you might realize how genuine and nice he is.