In August, the Kaneland High School administration implemented their new student lanyard expectation to promote school safety, requiring all students to wear a lanyard around their neck with their student ID attached to it.
The administrative expectation is for students to wear their lanyard, which is color coded by grade. Students can also use the IDs to sign in and out of classes for passes to the bathroom, nurse, office, other classrooms and more. While the program itself tracks the number of students in the hall, it also tracks the amount of time a student is out of class.
Principal Melinda Cattell is trying to get students to follow the new expectation while also respecting the need for compassion.
“It’s an expectation for right now for students to wear it,” Cattell said. “No one’s getting consequences if they’re not wearing it, but we would like them to wear it.”
Cattell hopes that students wear it for the safety of everyone in the school rather than disregard it completely and not wear it. To encourage students to wear their lanyards, the administrative team has implemented new rewards for following the expectations.
“That’s how they can get passes and get into games and earn points and stuff like that,” Cattell said.
Staff members who notice students wearing their lanyards can give out digital points via the 5-Star pass system. These points can be exchanged for different prizes. Additionally, student lanyards are now required to enter games.
The new lanyards are not just for the safety of Kaneland students, but also the safety of students from many other school districts who come to Kaneland High School during the day for classes as part of the Fox Valley Career Center (FVCC) program.
“We have three other schools that come to our school, and to help identify and help keep our building safe and their students safe as well, we talked about having the IDs worn by students,” Cattell said.
Choir director Bryan Kunstman, who has been at Kaneland for 25 years, believes the new lanyards are very helpful and serve a good purpose.
“My opinion is that the reason behind it is a good reason,” Kunstman said. “It’s for student safety. It’s for the safety of everybody in the building.”
The idea of wearing lanyards every day is not anything out of the ordinary, Kunstman noted, explaining that he has always worn his staff lanyard throughout his entire career at Kaneland.
“I’ve always just worn it,” Kunstman said. “It doesn’t cause me any pain. It doesn’t make me any less of a person.”
While discussing the benefits of the lanyards, he mentioned how students seem to disregard and ignore them because they do not want to wear them.
“Hopefully we can get beyond whatever negative stigma is going along with it and just realize that we’re trying to make everybody safe,” Kunstman said.
Members of the administrative team were not the only people who helped with the decision about the new lanyards. In fact, a student organization at Kaneland known as the Youth Advisory Board (YAB) also contributed to the idea.
“It’s usually just administration that comes to us and proposes ideas, and they ask what we want to see changed in the school,” sophomore and YAB member Megan Ross said, explaining her role on the board.
Administration discussed the idea of the lanyards with YAB members long before they were introduced to the whole school. The YAB played a role in giving advice and student opinions on the idea from a diverse group of students with different views.
“I think there were a few factors, but the main one was about safety, because with Fox Valley, there are three other schools coming to the school,” Ross said. “So really just identifying who’s Kaneland and who’s not.”
Safety of the students and the school are the overriding concerns and reasons for these new lanyards. And while students might not approve of the lanyards at first, YAB members hope that they will eventually adjust to them.
“I think it was something they were going to enforce either way, but we kind of helped put some input in,” Ross said. “It’s what we thought students would like.”
Despite the new expectation, Ross has noticed many students are not wearing their lanyards.
“I think it was a good idea, in theory, but so far I feel like I haven’t seen anyone wearing them,” Ross said.
Despite the neglect towards the lanyards so far, staff and administration remain hopeful that student opinions on the lanyards will change. They hope that the new benefits and requirements about wearing the lanyard will encourage students to wear them for the safety of others.
