It’s a normal day walking around the school and you get stopped by a dean in front of your friends to put your ID on. The embarrassment of having to search your pockets and backpack to find your lanyard is overwhelming and you have no choice but to go to the office to receive a wristband. 

Huntley High School is a large school of 3,000 students and the adults no longer have the ability to know everyone.

“The IDs give us an instant, easy way to know that you belong here,” Associate Principal Tom Kempf said.

The safety of the school is the constant, concerning question. Are these IDs absolutely necessary for us to wear around during the day?

There are more uses for the IDs than people realize on a normal basis. The IDs are used for organizing who needs to be inside the building, buying food in the lunchroom, and it serves as an easy, visual check to determine if someone belongs. 

“IDs are a simple way for the school to organize us,” sophomore Kathryn LaPorta said.

IDs are a cheap and efficient system for a large school to be able to recognize students and adults required to be in the building. There is no current system that can replace IDs that make it easy for people to realize if someone needs to be there. 

“It’s going to have to be as quick, easy, cheap to produce and it can’t be cost prohibited,” Kempf said.

Without IDs, there can be dangers of school safety if people should not be present in the building such as, graduates, intruders, etc. It is hard to identify people if there is no system as visually easier than IDs currently are. 

There are other things that help school safety such as campus security roaming the building and the cameras always being monitored in the hallways.

Other schools may not have the ID policy for the students but other schools are hard to compare to HHS due to the difference between the number of students. 

“Unfortunately in the world we live in which is the fears and the scary things out there for schools, a lot more schools are trending back to these readily available to make sure the kids are checked in where they are supposed to be,” Kempf said.

IDs may be annoying but they play a major role in our safety inside our school and provide visual help to adults to decide if you belong.