With the 2018-19 school year coming to an end changes to the next school year are being considered.  In the 2019-20 school year, students will be required to wear a lanyard with their school-issued ID attached at all times. PMHS has already made this change and SHS is taking what they have done and changing it up to fit the needs of the school. This will help with a number of issues that are taking place in the school.

The cafeteria lines get backed up easily with students having to type their lunch numbers in. There are now scanners next to the pin pads, and as of next year students will have to scan their student ID in order to get lunch. This along with other benefits are expected to come through these lanyards.

“In our cafeteria we are going to have it to where kids can scan their IDs,” Assistant principal Andrew Ashcraft said. “…Will it help with those other things, being able to ID students or tell really quickly whether they’re a freshman, sophomore, junior or senior, based on their lanyard colour? Yeah it would be helpful, that’s a secondary benefit of it.”

According to assistant principal Andrew Ashcraft, the lines in the cafeteria are predicted to move much faster with being able to scan the school IDs instead of waiting for others to type in their pin number.

Safety issues in the school are more of a medium-sized problem, even though the main reason for this switch is to help the cafeteria become more organized and run faster, Ashcraft claims. The student IDs will have important information in the back of them, like the attendance number, the main office number, and possibly the bullying hotline.

“I don’t want to make our school adult like and strict,” Ashcraft said.

Math teacher Kathleen Kundel thinks that wearing the IDs is a good idea because it will make it easier to identify whether or not someone is supposed to be in the building or not. Kundel also says that she personally likes having the lanyard on at all times because she can keep her keys on her at all times. This could be more beneficial to the teachers that catch students in the hallway that are doing things they aren’t supposed to. If they have their lanyard on it’ll be easier to identify them according to Kundel.

“If I see someone in the hallway doing something they aren’t supposed to, I don’t have to ask them what their name is I can probably see their name on their badge,” Kundel said.

To help enforce this rule, if a student were to not wear their lanyard at all during the day they wouldn’t be able to get lunch because they would have to scan their ID. The only way a student would be able to get lunch would be if they got a lanyard from the office. In addition, a student would be marked as insubordinate if they refuse to wear it at all, according to principal Brian Knight. The lanyard colors will be based on the cardinal’s colors, red, white and black and will each class will have a different color.

“I would hope that when we continue on, this becomes kind of a habit that everyone gets into,” Knight said.