My school has come up with the ultimate plan to prevent our school from becoming the target of some disgruntled student.
Their plan is: (drumroll)
Hey, let’s make everyone wear a 3" by 2" plastic card around their neck. We can put a 1"x1" picture on it, and their name too!
As you can probably tell, I think this is not going to help anything. I think that it could, with a few improvements it could actually be somewhat effective. For instance, if they actually CHECKED them at the door, and not let anyone in who didn’t have theirs, or if ALL the teachers enforced the rule, or if the hall monitors actually stopped you in the halls if you didn’t have yours on.
I don’t particularly mind wearing it, except for the punishment when you aren’t wearing it (detention, not much, I know, but still…), I just feel that it could be more effective and is a completely ineffective policy as it is.
So, what I’m wondering is, what do you all think about mandatory school I.D.'s in general? Can they actually be effective in preventing violence? What sort of rules should they be implemented with to be effective?
It has been my experience that you can implement anything you want, and it won’t be effective. What counts is what you EXECUTE for it to be effective. Making everyone wear pink socks would work, as long as compliance is 100% throughout the administration.
It may not exactly prevent violence but it may help to keep unwanted intruders out. Not that any of the recent school shootings were like this but I remember when I was in high school all of the really BAD things that happened were done by people from other high schools who came in to out school, caused trouble, then quickly exited. You may not reduce any voilence within your school but you may well ward off violence that gets brought in from outside your school.
“Can’t you hear the violence playing your song” - Pantera
My school implemented those last year. We just kept on bitching and complaining to the point that they just required you have them on you, not visible. So my suggestion is get a group together and raise holy hell!
One of our valedictorians at graduation even landed one last sucker punch about how stupid the idea was. We were happy, the principal wasn’t so much.
We had those once, and for about a week it was a really big thing. You couldn’t get into class if you didn’t have yours on. No lunch without school ID. After a while, we just asked, “What is this going to prevent, really??” Our teacher’s answer: "If there were ever an emergency and we had to do a lockdown, the only way you could get back into class was if you slipped your school ID under the door so we knew it was you.’
“Couldn’t somebody just kill a kid in the hall and steal theirs?”
Pause.
After a week or so, nobody cared anymore. All we had to have them for was to get lunch, and even then you could still buy lunch so long as you knew your student ID number.
Students don’t have to wear ID’s where I teach now, but they did at a place that I was formerly employed. Every so often they would stress to the teachers to not let students in class without an ID.
This was ridiculous. I knew the students in my class. Where they needed the ID’s was walking in the halls so that we would know if someone didn’t belong there. They never made any effort to enforce the students wearing ID’s while in the hall, though.
Student ID’s are a ridiculous idea, and expensive to. My old high school implemented them the year after I left. I’m planning to visit my teachers when school opens next week, but I’m told that I first must get a visitor’s ID from the Principal’s office.
We used to have Student IDs when I was in high school. I never used it once until my senior year(1983). Then we found the perfect use for it. T.A.G(the assasination game). Any of you remember that? For those of you that don’t, you have a group of people, and one ref. Each person is assigned a target and a each person is someone elses target(sort of cirlce), and you didnt know the identity of anybody in the game, except for your target. In a crowded school, it could be anybody out to get you. People carried fake guns(water guns, little guns that shoot plastic disks etc), fake knives(made of aluminum foil, so that if you crushed the blade against someone, they were dead)even had friend that built a very elaborate fake bomb, that set off all four flashes of a flash cube to represent an explosin. You were only allowed to “kill” your target, your assasin, or anyone with a weapon visible. If you shot a bystander, you were out. there were two seperate games going at our school at the same time. Some people were in both games.
SO anyway, we all would turn over our id card to the ref, and he would randomly distribute them. Whoever’s card you got in the draw was your target. The teachers hated it, even though we made a rule against taking someone out during class, we still got weapons confiscated, and the guy stabing the other one with the foil knife liked to cause the teacher to have a heart attack(it was in passing period, and froma distance it look real.
I can just imagine what kind of coniption the school administrators would have if someone tried to run a game in this day and age. Damn it was fun, even though I was nervous wreck by the end of the game(I won).
Luckily our High School wasn’t like most other ones. We had about 20 different buildings, just like a University. So it was always pretty easy to exit or enter the school whenever. Which made all measures like metal detectors, ID cards and whatnot absolutely useless. Life was good, and even though the cops got called a couple of times, and we had lots of fights we never had to suffer the humiliation subjected to other kids. We were treated as adults, and for the most part we cted like adults. And the school dealt with the consequences as the came up.
My HS had ID cards, but they were used for nothing. Not. One. Thing. Not the library, not lunch, nothing. As far as I recall, you weren’t even required to have it on you. They didn’t even need it for public transit, as the transit system issues its own student IDs and they came to the school to take your picture (where your identity was proven well enough by the shudder school uniforms). I still don’t know what it was good for.
The reason it is reprehensible, of course, is that it’s yet another useless, half-baked, phony-baloney measure which will not work. Same with school uniforms.
You want a solution? Here’s your solution. Enforce the rules which already exist. FIND the students that are causing trouble and making life miserable for others, PUNISH them, and punish them IMMEDIATELY and HARSHLY. That will eliminate violence, by eliminating the need for violence. Nothing else will.
<scene opens on a room of administrators at a local high school> "I know, I know. We’ll end violence by making every child look like a dork. and we’ll provide them with dog tags to make identifying kids easy in case the plan fails. It covers them coming and going!
I think its a stupid idea. Haven’t most (if not all) of the recent school shootings been commited by a student of the school? So whats the point of wearing a name tag.
“O look. Frank Johnson is shooting Sam Kelly in the head. Thank god we have those name tags! We never would have known that Frank Johnson shot Sam Kelly.”
And we have those sorts of ID cards for teachers, and as far as I could tell, they’ve done aboslutly nothing whatsoever. I have no clue what our school is trying to DO here, with steps in completely unrelated directions, and going from “everyone in the hall after class starts gets Saturday School” for two weeks, and then suddenly stopping, so our halls fill up after class with nary a sound. How FUN.
I think the “solution” is to create smaller schools where most people have a reasonable chance of knowing everyone else and knowing who belongs in school and who doesn’t. Schools also need to enforce existing rules. Ignoring bullies really does not make them go away!
They tried to implement an “student-wearing-ID” policy at a school around here, and, not surprisingly, the students threw a fit. I was surprised, however, when a student was quoted in the paper calling the practice “humiliating”. Will they think it’s so “humiliating” to wear an ID in their future workplace? Wearing IDs in school may be “pointless” (especially if it’s spottily enforced), but I’m not sure it’s humiliating.
