GALESBURG — District 205’s Board of Education came to a tie vote Monday night on whether Galesburg High School students should be required to wear an ID around their neck at all times.
Board members Courtney Rodriguez, Pamella Bess-Tabb and Tianna Cervantez voted in favor of amending the high school’s code of conduct in order to make it no longer mandatory for students to wear an ID on a lanyard around their neck.
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Rod Scherpe, Maury Lyon and Rodney Phelps voted against changing the code of conduct so as to continue requiring students to wear their IDs. Tera Boettcher was absent.
With the tie vote, the high school’s code of conduct is unchanged and the item will return for another discussion and vote during the board’s next meeting Aug. 8.
Cervantez acknowledged that the purpose of IDs is to help identify who is in the building but argued that there is no good reason to require them to be worn on lanyards.
She argued that lanyards can easily flip IDs around to appear blank, that teachers and security staff should get familiar with students’ faces instead, and that the mandatory rule is causing fights that erode relationships between students and staff.
“Instead of asking our students to rise to the expectations that we have of them to be responsible young adults, we want to cater to what we feel the lower denominator is and in doing so we are taking up time from our teachers and administrators and our students do not understand the reason,” Cervantez said. “We are an educational system, not a jail.”
Superintendent John Asplund said he was concerned that, with the addition of seventh and eighth grades in Galesburg High School next year, IDs should be visible and that students will be more likely to forget bringing their IDs to school if they are not required to be visible.
The board also tacked on an amendment that would change the fee of a new ID and lanyard for students from $5 to $1. With the tie vote, no change was made to the fee.
The board discussed the possibility of entering an agreement with Skyward, a school administration software company, to purchase software and equipment that would shift the onus of tracking student attendance from school staff over to students.
Using a “Skyward Attendance Kiosk Station,” students arriving tardy at the high school would swipe their ID cards or punch in their student ID numbers into a machine before heading to class.
The district could also purchase a similar system for classroom attendance, wherein students would swipe or punch their IDs upon arriving at their class and, in theory, alleviate teachers from having to conduct headcounts themselves and create a record of where students are located in the event of an emergency.
Jennifer Hamm, assistant superintendent of finance, said it would cost the district $19,320 for the tardy kiosk system and $142,800 for the classroom attendance system. An additional $10,000 would also be required to train staff to use the equipment as it would require the school to use new software, bringing the total cost of the program to $172,120.
Asplund said that he didn’t see the value of the tardy kiosk stations and that he gets “nervous when we start taking the human element out of things.”
Cervantez argued in favor of the system, saying that making use of the technology could help give teachers more instruction time and teach students personal responsibility.
The board did not vote on purchasing the program. Asplund said that he would like more info on the program for the board’s next meeting, particularly on the possibility of running a pilot program on the system first.