Any East senior is allowed to go gallivanting around the entire town of Chapel Hill and beyond during their lunch period, provided that they have an off-campus pass. Yet can they walk from one side of campus to another during lunch? The school would like the answer to be no.
This is just one of a recent flurry of movement restrictions invoked by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district in the name of safety, as announced in a Dec. 13 email from acting principal Aaron Acome. Entering the building has become tightly controlled, forcing the flow of students through just a few entrances. Student IDs have lost their main functionality of opening doors. Students must spend all but the first 10 minutes of the lunch period in the same place, although interpretations of what that means vary.
In total, these restrictions form an utterly ridiculous attempt to protect students. It has become safety theater that vaguely hints at protecting students, but offers infinitesimal benefits and large drawbacks for the very population they are meant to serve.
It is patently true that there are real threats to safety, including the threat of a school shooting that looms heavily on the minds of many at East. The recent shooting in Oxford, Mich., has only heightened the perceived danger. Yet this is an insufficient excuse for the failure of the ID and lunch policies that have been implemented.
These bizarre diktats affect more than just students getting into the school and whether they go off-campus for lunch. They also utterly destroy the club policies that the school had set just weeks before. Under those restrictions, clubs often met during part of lunch and ate lunch outside for the rest of lunch. Now, however, the new rules seem to make this forbidden, although no email has yet adequately addressed the contradiction between the two. Any system of club passes that may solve the dilemma has not yet been implemented. Luckily, enforcement of this policy has been rare and inconsistent so far, but the threat still looms overhead.
The negative risks of this one absurdity alone can outweigh a lot of safety benefits. The simple way to satisfy the contradiction, that clubs meet inside while eating lunch, has until now been viewed as a COVID threat. Although I personally feel comfortable eating lunch inside, any students who would rather not, or teachers who do not want students eating in their room, would be forced to choose between forgoing club activities, not eating lunch, or violating their own personal risk tolerance if those rules were ever enforced. The school should not be encouraging that trilemma.
Furthermore, the strange nature of the ID policy is little better than the lunch policy. It crowds certain entrances for no apparent reason and makes it more likely that students are locked out of the building, which is a safety threat in and of itself.
The ID policy also poses yet another burden on teachers, on top of all the stresses of returning from remote schooling and being required to teach an entirely new PAC class. They can no longer send students outside without accompanying them, which occurred regularly before this policy. And it is likely that the burden of enforcing the new lunch requirements will yet again fall upon them.
And all this for what? The school and district have both failed to present any evidence whatsoever that these requirements will actually increase safety, while there is ample evidence of clear negative risks. To take the threat of a school shooting, the ur-example of a school safety concern, the benefits of any of these policies are unclear. I would presume students are not visibly holding weaponry while walking through the entrances that are now verboten, or are only able to access a weapon during the middle of lunch.
I’m no expert on the dynamics of fights at East, but yet again, if there is evidence for these dubious changes, the students deserve to see it. Common sense fails to explain why forcing students closer together in the beginning of the day and making it harder for them to get away from a potentially tense situation during lunch is an anti-fight measure.
In the unlikely event that there is a further secret threat to our safety that supposedly necessitates these changes, it is dangerous and irresponsible for the school not to provide actual details about the threat. The student body is reduced to speculation because the school provides not one iota of transparency about its bewildering mandates.
All this isn’t just bad for student life and learning at East; it does us a disservice in terms of preparing us for the real world. Outside the schoolyard gates, there are no requirements to stay in one place during lunch break. Almost anybody can enter a building.
Even in college, only a little of this will hold true. Although there may be some restrictions on student IDs, students will have the freedom to do many tasks, including eat meals, on their own schedule. For all the ways in which the district tries to prepare students for college, they make no effort to prepare us for the freedom inherent in our next steps in life. Although keeping us safe is rightfully a district priority, it is also important that they do so in ways commensurate with the rest of our life.
All in all, the new restrictions end up with absurd results. Students are left confused by these sudden changes and puzzled by how to best interpret these confounding rules. These supposed improvements only add up to a mix of safety theater and worsened conditions.
Photo by Hammond Cole Sherouse
