When Maine Township District 207 suggested requiring students and staff to wear identification cards last winter, it seemed a well-intentioned approach to building secure and welcoming communities inside the three high schools.
Chicago had done it for years with few problems. So had a few schools in Elgin, Carpentersville and Round Lake.
But now, not even three months into the school year, Maine officials are under pressure to reconsider the ID policy after a rebuke from two Maine South staffers earlier this week and a general wariness on the part of many students and some faculty.
“What started out as a really good idea has backfired,” said Jay Kyp-Johnson, a psychologist at Maine South who believes the policy, despite great expectations, has contributed to a more confrontational atmosphere.
The premise was simple: By requiring staff, students and visitors to prominently display student ID badges or visitor passes, the district would rid the halls of strangers and strip troublemakers of their anonymity. Better yet, the tensions natural to a high school setting would be eased because everybody would know everybody–or at least their names.
But reviews have been mixed from the get-go. Maine East Principal Carol Grenier says students and staff have largely embraced the idea. Maine South Principal Tom Cachur, on the other hand, questions the rationale.
“I’d give it a grade of fair–a C-minus at best,” he said, citing poor compliance and an unwillingness, at least to date, on the part of administrators to mete out real punishment for those breaking the code.
Paul Leathem, principal at Maine West in Des Plaines, also has concerns, including haphazard compliance and teacher complaints about wasting classroom time to enforce the policy.
But the strongest public criticism came during a board meeting this week when Kyp-Johnson and physics instructor Paul Gabel ridiculed the policy as misguided and asked the board to consider freeing each school to decide whether to adopt the policy.
“I understand the goals of the ID tags, but I don’t believe the measure will meet those goals,” said Gabel, who along with Kyp-Johnson oversees Hawk Pride, a separate program designed to boost relations between students and staff. “The desire for safer, friendlier schools is not being achieved,” Gabel said.
More worrisome, they say, is the potential for the IDs to poison the goals of Hawk Pride, which focuses on building a code of conduct through mutual trust among students, teachers and staff.
“The ID tags have gone in the other direction as far as creating a less trusting environment,” Gabel said. “I have had more conflicts with students this year, mostly over having to enforce the name tag rule. Most of these are confrontations that would not have occurred otherwise.”
The pair also took exception to how the program came to pass.
As with Hawk Pride, the ID policy grew out of a student standards committee that drew up recommendations to, among other things, boost attendance rates and put a lid on classroom disruptions.
But what originally was proposed as optional soon became mandatory, despite surveys showing varying degrees of support at each school. At Maine East in Park Ridge, for instance, the feedback was mostly positive. However, a vast majority of community members, students and faculty at Maine South, also located in Park Ridge, scoffed at the idea.
Meanwhile, Maine South senior Mark Ishu cast doubt on whether the policy really improved security, noting the ease with which any outsider could forge a visitor’s pass. He also questioned a requirement to immediately replace lost or forgotten IDs at a cost of $5.
District Supt. Steven Snider has heard the complaints and has asked Maine’s three principals to gather Tuesday to hash out the pros and cons of the policy.
“If, in fact, the name tags have been a cause for contentiousness in our schools,” he said, “then they need to be evaluated from that perspective.”
But Snider is hardly prepared to dump the policy, believing it is simply struggling through growing pains.
He says, “I believe the motivation is still very positive. . . . It’s not as if we have asked for something that is wholly unbearable.”
