Eagle Point schools require them for safety

Jay Reed used to just grab his backpack each morning and head off to Eagle Point High School. Now, though, the sophomore has to make sure he has his photo identification badge, which all students must wear on campus.

"I hate them," Jay said. "This is like prison, but with no cable TV."

The badges for students and teachers were instituted this fall as a safety measure so officials could quickly and easily identify people at the school, said Vice Principal Brock Rowley.

"The bottom line is student safety," he said. "We want people to feel safe on campus and we want to know who belongs here."

A bar code on the badge enables students to check out books from the school library, receive class textbooks and buy lunch in the cafeteria, he said. Replacing lost textbooks costs the district thousands of dollars annually and improving book tracking should save money, he said.

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Eagle Point High School teachers started wearing badges when classes began in September and students got their badges about two weeks later, Rowley said.

Students at White Mountain Middle School also wear badges. All teachers in the Eagle Point district will sport badges by the end of this month, said Superintendent Bill Feusahrens.

Feusahrens said the district spent $8,982 from its safety and security budget to buy a printer, camera and materials to make the identification badges.

Several schools in Medford and Central Point require teachers to wear identification badges, but Eagle Point is the first local district to extend the requirement to students, Rowley said.

He said Eagle Point High School has had occasional problems with young trespassers who look like students or visitors who don’t want to tell officials who they are or why they are there.

"We have issues similar to every school in the valley," he said.

Freshman Dannie Curtis said she understands administrators’ safety concerns but she thinks the badges are more trouble than they’re worth.

"It doesn’t seem like they do anything," she said. "They are really bad for us."

As she and her friends gathered at their lockers before heading to lunch, they said they had heard about teens who don’t attend the school hanging around, but had never seen anyone suspicious. They said they knew students who had been punished for not wearing badges or for swapping them with friends.

Students who don’t wear their identification face disciplinary action and a $5 fee to replace each card, Rowley said. He said only a few students each day fail to comply.

However, Principal Mari Brabbin announced at an assembly last month that the school had spent $1,171 on replacement student identification and couldn’t afford to keep it up. She said the campus would be closed, so students could no longer leave for lunch, as an additional safety measure unless badge-wearing behavior improved. Students have until Christmas break to improve.

The leadership class at the school has helped develop appropriate punishment to encourage students to wear their identification, Brabbin said. Students lacking visible badges receive temporary badges and have to eat a supervised lunch on campus.

Eagle Point resident Cheryl Vinson, whose son is a junior, said she considered keeping him home from school one day when he couldn’t find his badge so he wouldn’t rack up replacement fees. Fees must be paid for a student to graduate.

"Are schools so underfunded that they have to extort money from children with the threat of not letting them graduate?" her husband, Sean Vinson, asked in a letter sent to the Mail Tribune. "This policy is wrong and parents of EPHS students should say so."

Reach reporter Anita Burke at 776-4485, or e-mail aburke@mailtribune.com.