Each year, faculty and security staff vow to be strict about making students wear IDs on campus. As the school year passes, staff’s commitment to this rule withers away, due to a mix of faculty neglecting the rules and students disregarding the policy from the minute it was enacted.  The 2022-2023 school year has been no different.

With Creek’s student body of about 4,000, it is crucial that all people that enter and exit the campus are accounted for- and one of the easiest ways for security to keep track in all the commotion is by ensuring that students and faculty are wearing their IDs. 

“It’s a layer of accountability of who should and shouldn’t be on our campus,” Assistant Principal and Head of Security Kevin Uhlig said.  

Although wearing student IDs for the safety of the campus is extremely vital, it is difficult for faculty to enforce the policy when students lack concern over the issue. 

At the beginning of the school year, in morning announcements and through the intercom, staff promised to be extra vigilant and devote more energy to enforcement. Between classes, Creek faculty encouraged students to wear their IDs in the hallways. To enforce this measure, students could even be put in supervised study for having too many infractions. 

“You know, we started implementing IDs before COVID hit,” Uhlig said. “And we really hammered it hard and it was just really combative…our community really resisted it in a lot of ways. 

Now, students go without punishment for not wearing IDs. According to sophomore Norah Armstrong, enforcement has not been strict. 

“There has been a huge decline in ID enforcement, especially after freshmen were allowed to go off campus,” Armstrong said. 

For the first month of the school year, freshmen had their IDs checked regularly to confirm that they were staying on campus during lunch periods. In September, they were given privileges to go off campus. Soon after the surveillance of the freshman class stopped, so did ID reinforcement for almost the entire campus.

Now that school has been in session for close to six months, most teachers and deans don’t have the time to correct student behavior. 

“In an ideal world we would have [enforcement] on our minds,” English teacher Ariell Bachman said. “In the real world, it is not.” 

According to Uhlig, on admin’s ideal campus, teachers wouldn’t need to have IDs on the front of their minds, and students could be responsible for their own IDs. Wearing IDs doesn’t seem like too much of an ask to non-students from Uhlig’s perspective, but to some students, they pose a considerable inconvenience. 

“It’s just annoying to have [my student ID] around my neck all the time, especially while I’m just in class,” Armstrong said. 

Due to this discomfort, the majority of Creek’s students have diverted to attaching their IDs to their backpacks, which allows for visibility but is still not ideal. 

Since lanyards are the most convenient way for students and faculty to properly wear their IDs, according to Uhlig, the current system is due for reevaluation. Although there has been no new ideas to fix this issue, security is still working to find new ways to make ID wearing accepted and normalized by students, for the safety of Creek’s campus and everything around it. 

“I want [wearing IDS] to be something that our community understands…and just accepts,” Uhlig said.