The punishment for having no ID is unfair, as students have to pay for a temporary one and are eventually required to serve ISS, in school suspension if they still cannot find their card, according to the JBHS website.

Forgetting a simple, plastic card makes these punishments ruthless and strict. However, others might argue that the school’s punishment on IDs will help students prepare for the possibility of higher security, such as security doors with card scanners.

The problem is, if the school is planning on higher security, the school shouldn’t have enforced these security IDs at this time where IDs are otherwise useless. These punishments should be in effect when IDs do more important functions, like accessing doors normally locked in the back of the school, paying for lunch with one scan of a card instead of inserting your student ID, and even scanning your card for attendance.

In the back of the fine arts building, there are locked doors, enforcing the idea that students must go through the front entrance. Students are discouraged from opening these doors to others needing to get in,, as students could allow intruders into the campus. Using IDs, students could access these locked doors. This both saves time and strengthens our security. IDs would then be more important and current punishments would fit the crime.

Paying for lunch requires typing in your student ID number, a time-consuming requirement when there is a line of students waiting to purchase lunch. What if we implemented a card scanner? This would surely speed up the lunch lines, and would modernize school.

Our ID numbers are used enough for us to remember them. ID numbers allow access to our chromebooks, BLEND, and our google drive. It is already needed to access most of our online school devices. It’s time we let our ID cards become of value.

Attendance can be stressful and time-consuming for teachers when the class is acting disruptive or when they are teaching. However, our IDs show our faces and student number, so the same information digitally would ease attendance. Students would insert their cards into a scanner, and the data will appear on the teacher’s computer. It would then be fair to implement the punishments for losing your ID, because IDs would be necessary in class.

Purchasing card scanners and updating ID cards to be more functional will cost money for the school. However, at least implementing one of these ideas is more useful than purchasing many plastic ID cards with minimalistic uses. If Bowie wants higher security, implementing more functionality in our ID cards is progress.

Imagine ID cards as pebbles. It seems unfair to enforces heavy punishments when pebbles easily get misplaced. We must make these pebbles more valuable, like gold. Then, it would make sense to put strict punishments if a person loses gold. There is an incentive to keep gold, so we force ourselves to not misplace it. We need to increase value if we want to enforce harsh punishments.

So, just like gold, we need IDs to have higher value. If we have more important uses for our IDs instead of just entering class, we can turn these unfair punishments into reasonable ones.