In a time when school shootings are at an all-time high, there has been considerable pressured applied to school districts to help make students feel safe on campus. Due to concerns surrounding school safety, officials in LASA’s administration announced that to respond to very real dangers they would require students to wear IDs.

This move comes at a time where the danger of school shootings are just now being recognized by the public. In just the past 10 years, U.S schools have been subjected to 180 shootings. This crisis has been talked about by everyone from state and federal politicians to your parents and friends. However, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), only 7% of schools in America use student IDs to make their campus more secure. While the majority of schools noticed these shootings as being legitimate dangers, they have opted for other, more effective methods. According to the NCES, schools have overwhelmingly preferred the use of security cameras to watch students in the halls, the use of police dogs to check for drugs or bombs and uniforms to identify who belongs on campus. The LASA administration has told students that they want to help build more secure communities, and they cite the implementation of IDs as proof of their commitment to this. Though when I walk through the halls, I see very few people even bothering to hide the fact they aren’t wearing their IDs. Administrations fail to understand that being scolded into wearing them won’t really stick and that as long as students do not perceive themselves to be in legitimate danger, they will not wear their IDs. Even if students wear them, it doesn’t necessarily make the school any safer than before. In an act of shooting, all an ID can do is identify students and staff. While this may be useful should a dangerous person enter the school, it does not truly help keep anyone out of the premises, as I have seen multiple non-students on campus walking their pets. IDs cannot keep out anyone who wants to get on campus, and the administration needs to understand that walking onto campus is nowhere near as hard as it should be. We need to understand that not all kids will always have them on and that this could potentially raise danger in the event of an actual school shooting. A purple lanyard will not keep our entire school safe.

In a school of over 1000 students, there is no way to ensure everyone is always wearing their ID. Punishment obviously hasn’t had any real effect on what proportion of students wear their IDs, and students have discovered that the administration doesn’t have any real power to enforce wearing IDs. LASA’s IDs seem to be unique to our school. I have friends that attend schools from all over the city, and none have ever indicated to me that their school makes them wear IDs. If LASA is, for all practical purposes, the same as other schools in the district, what warrants the implementation of IDs here and not anywhere else? While the administration may make the claim that is to help make the school a safer campus, the lack of transparency warrants caution and arguably suspicion. The school has other methods to keep students safe. They have to use other ways even if they didn’t want to because an ID simply cannot fix everything. It cannot prevent someone from entering the campus and it cannot keep every threat out of our school. Gun laws have not changed significantly, and Texas is known for being lenient with regards to ownership of firearms. The school has no power to restrict these things, but the school does have control over how they are going to keep students safe, and they must pick a more efficient and genuinely useful strategy.