Whether you remember last year’s lime-green run in with student ID cards, noticed the newfound crowds surrounding the Kobe doors and Main entrance in the morning, or have recently overheard whispered warnings of new scannable IDs coming to the district, LM’s new policies aimed at increasing student safety are top of mind for many students. But how much is actually changing?
Despite the buzz among the student body, the administration’s plans for rolling out scannable IDs are not yet set in stone. Administration hopes to introduce new technology for monitoring students’ locations, motivated mostly by Principal Dr. Johnson’s opinion that scannable IDs are “about that student safety piece, [because] it’s important to vet students coming into the building,” and a desire to be proactive when responding to dangers. While no investments in new technology have been made as of late September of this year, there are some things students can definitely expect when new IDs roll out.
Starting later this fall, scanning your ID cards into the building will mark you as “here” in LM’s system. ID cards won’t be used to take attendance in each class, but only in the morning when first arriving for the day and for students with last-set frees as a way to sign out when they exit. When interviewed, Dr. Johnson stated that he hopes the utility can be extended beyond this to “systems that will integrate with the cafeteria, so instead of punching in your code you would just swipe your ID, using it in the library, and generally utilizing ID cards throughout the building” and possibly granting entry into doors when passing between the chemistry building and main building. Johnson described how ID lanyards could speed up the late attendance procedures, reducing “an eight or nine step process to give a student a late pass, which just makes you later to class, to a one step process that gets students through the line quicker.”
As of now there’s no confirmed implementation plan or strategy for ID cards. However, what we do know is that carrying ID cards and using them to scan into the building is likely in every LM student’s future. Some students, especially those who have experienced ID card policies at other schools, have concerns.
Shira Dorff ’26 used to attend a school with an ID policy similar to the one coming to LM, and they predicted additional hassle and delays. “It’ll lead to a buildup by the scanners, making it harder to make it to classes on time in the chem building.” Dorff also expressed concern about the IDs as a safety measure, saying that “coming from a school that did have IDs, I didn’t feel any safer having one than not. They didn’t feel safe or useful, just like an annoyance. It’s just not helpful, except for attendance purposes.”
Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, is dedicated to ID cards as a way to increase student safety. He stressed how heavily safety weighs on the minds of an administrative team trying to create a healthy learning environment, saying “We have a big responsibility; if ever we were to have a real life lockdown, one of the questions that would be asked is: ‘Do you have all your students?’ We want to be able to say yes.” To Johnson, these new policies are just one more way to make sure all students are safe, present, and accounted for.
However, one change seems to be weighing heavier on students than on administration: the extension of freshman office time to January, limiting Lunch and Learn for LM’s youngest students through the entire first semester. While previously, freshmen were able to access lunch and learn by late November, the class of 2027 will spend the entirety of 2023 in what students interviewed affectionately called “freshman jail.”
This change was chosen by the administration because of logistical concerns and the desire to match the switch out of lunch and learn with the break in semesters, since, as Johnson pointed out, “The January timeframe gives us a natural break in the year to make a shift, [while] the November timeframe does not allow us as much of that. It’s an evaluation of how we want to manage that time better to make it more feasible and how many more students we’re introducing to that time,” Johnson says the decision of the freshmen’s release was made based on a variety of logistical factors highlighting that “it’s a crowded time, and we take note of how we manage it, how the hallways look, and what procedures need to be changed before we move to allow more students to have that time during the day.”
Put simply, it’s easy to observe that keeping freshmen out of Lunch and Learn limits the number of students in hallways and collaborative spaces at any time. By delaying the freshmen’s introduction to Lunch and Learn, it lets staff spend the first half the year managing less chaotic and crowded hallways and gives them more time to perfect Lunch and Learn procedures.
Despite this, some students disagree with the reasoning behind extending office time. It’s generally accepted that, as Dr. Johnson put it, “The whole purpose of why 9th graders don’t start with Lunch and Learn is to hopefully build some good habits with accessing that time and to help freshmen get adapted to the freedom and responsibility of Lunch and Learn,” but some students wonder if an extended office time period for freshmen will aid in developing healthy habits or stunt the social integration of freshmen into the school. This includes Callie Borden ’25, who argued that “it should last until the end of September. I often ended up ditching it for club meetings, and it didn’t help me get adjusted to LM at all.” Like many others, Borden worries about the relative isolation of freshmen during lunch, and remembers the difficulty of talking to friends in other grades or connecting with clubs as a freshman when confined to a teacher’s Learn or the cafeteria.
Shira Dorff ’26 also opposed the policy change, saying that while it did help them adjust to the school, “It made attending clubs much more difficult. I think it should last until Halloween but having it last until January is such a bad idea.” Dorff recognizes the idea that extending Lunch and Learn would prevent fights and misbehavior from new students but objects, saying that while “there are individuals who abuse Lunch and Learn, they can be assigned to a teacher or disciplined appropriately. Individuals who are doing well in their classes and understand the responsibility of being a student at LM should not need that amount of time.”
For students opposed to the change, or freshmen hoping for a reprieve, Johnson did leave a small hope of flexibility, adding that “there might be the possibility that it happens in December or ends a bit earlier, but we identified January as a reasonable timeframe to move forward.”
Throughout our interview, Johnson stressed that he’s aiming not to create new policies but to enforce and implement policies that were in the books when he entered his time as principal. While seniors and juniors may remember an LM where students, especially upperclassmen, commonly left the building during frees and at lunch, sat undisturbed in hallways and stairwells, and generally had a large amount of freedom when moving through the day, enforcement has steadily increased over the last few years, a trend that seems to be continuing in the new school year. For now, students should prepare themselves for several changes to their routines, as administration prioritizes keeping students safe.
