Where do you draw the line between prudent security precautions and over-the-top restrictions that do more harm than good? Students at Montgomery Blair High School recently provided one answer to that question, but unfortunately it was the wrong one.
The school was recently roiled over Principal Phillip Gainous’ sensible decision to issue color-coded IDs in 11 colors, identifying all 3,000 students (i.e., black for seniors, red for freshmen, white for magnet students, yellow for those with limited English skills) and the five smaller “learning academies” to which they are assigned.
With school shootingsalmost commonplace, security on the Silver Spring campus is a significant concern. The IDs allow administrators to instantly identify where a particular student belongs, so their security value far outweighs any other objections.
Gainous initially thought the colorful IDs would also add to students’ sense of identity, sort of like wearing the school colors to homecoming. Hah! Students called them “a hideous embarrassment.” However their major objection — one that got the attention of many outside the school — was that color-coding further divides students already grappling with racial and economic differences. But anybody who’s been in a high school cafeteria lately knows this is nonsense. The student newspaper acknowledged as much itself in an editorial opposing the new IDs: “Self-segregation is already an issue in the student body,” the editorial admitted, but arguing that the ID policy “has essentially institutionalized the phenomenon.”
The Washington Post weighed in against the IDs, huffing that the “whole thing smacks of a public caste system.”
Deep breath, everybody. These are high school students we’re talking about, inscrutable creatures who are finely attuned to minute variations in their peers’ style and behavior. The idea that Montgomery Blair students don’t already know the exact position of everybody else on the high school social totem pole is ridiculous; they could probably map out the school’s subgroups better than a sociology Ph.D.
To his credit, Gainous has refused to budge, warning students they risk suspension if caught not wearing their colorful IDs more than once. Even if the adolescents in his charge don’t like it, the adult community should have rallied behind the person ultimately responsible for the safety of thousands of students and staff.
Montgomery County should save its outrage for a far more hideous embarrassment: An Oct. 18 memo by MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast informing the county that school administrators at eight high schools illegally changed grades for 46 varsity athletes academically ineligible to play. Notably, the list does not include Montgomery Blair.
Weast promised that all 46 would be kicked off the teams and their original failing grades restored, but so far nothing has been said publicly about firing school officials who blamed the rampant grade-fixing on “inadvertent human error and/or lack of diligence” while Weast “works on our processes.”
Here’s betting that every single student at Einstein, Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Winston Churchill, Quince Orchard, Walter Johnson, Watkins Mill, Wheaton and Walt Whitman high schools can see right through that one, too.
