Today, many schools are looking for a way to boost their security. Across the United States, due to recent events, members of a school’s community are looking for a way to make the school environment safer. Whether it’s arming teachers, changing the gun laws for stricter access, or hiring more guards, schools are looking for an answer.

One simple step to solving this issue at Naugatuck High School is to bring back the schoolwide requirement that students must wear their school provided IDs.

The overall objective of this requirement is to boost school security by requiring students to wear their school IDs or at least make them visible at all times.

Despite many of the school shooters today being students within the schools themselves, people like the Parkland shooter or even Sandy Hook shooter would have been more identifiable because they did not belong in the school.

Through this, it will be easier to identify all students, staff members, and visitors at a glance, know at a glance if someone who is in the building belongs on school grounds, track student attendance by using the IDs to enter and leave the classroom, and track student movement by using the IDs to check into the nurses office, cafeteria, guidance counselors etc.

While there are clear benefits to school security that the visible IDs can provide; there also social benefits to them as well.

These benefits can range from: encouraging students and staff to learn one another’s name, build self-esteem by calling students by their name, and also prevent students from feeling invisible by simply knowing their name. Visible IDs can be primarily useful for the beginning of the school year when there are new students, and students are beginning to experience new teachers, whom they may not have had in the previous school year if they have already been at the high school.

One of the biggest proposals is for Naugatuck High School to implement a system, where streamlining the school’s various services are possible.

By streamlining school services such as lunch and the media center, it will allow students to save time by making the duration for students have to wait in line for lunch and for checking in and out of the media center (also for checking out books) to shorten considerably. By making things more efficient for students and faculty through their IDs, all parties will be more motivated to wear their IDs, ultimately fulfilling its purpose. By implementing a system for the IDs, it will be undoubtedly give the IT department and the Tech Wizards a more prominent role in the school, and maybe incentivise students to join the Tech Wizards.

According to an article published by Zebra Technologies, in the 2011 Campus Safety magazine, “How Safe Is Your Campus” report, it revealed that in the year 2011 that 52% of faculty said that their institutions fail to dedicate sufficient resources to school/campus safety and security. Despite the seven year time difference this report still rings some truth today.

Not many educational institutions know what to do in order to prevent school shooting or school violence, but schools need to start somewhere, and one simple solution that is both easy to implement and cost effective is requiring students to wear their IDs.

Of course there is no perfect solution to an issue, but together as a school, we can make the environment in which we learn a better and safer one.