Students: When was the last time you wore your ID around your neck and stowed your phone in a Yondr pouch? And teachers: When was the last time you reminded a student to wear an ID around their neck or stow their phone in a Yondr pouch?
Two policies the high school has on-and-off enforced are now virtually nonexistent, apart from the half-hearted Yondr pouch check during crew periods. It was big news when the school announced that cell phones would be banned for the 2024-25 school year — the ensuing outrage and spite among students amounted to a whole lot of struggle and not a whole lot of results. The tedious morning entrance line would stall every time a phone was discovered and pouched; arguments between students disobeying the policy and teachers trying to enforce it were frequent; there were stretches for months when the administration seemed to forget about their policy, then overnight would claim to redouble their efforts and crack down on offenders of the phone ban.
Today, you could not show me a single student who doesn’t discretely have a calculator or burner phone tucked away in their Yondr pouch.
The state of the ID policy is even sadder. If you remember, the reason for the policy was because three intruders entered an unsecured north gym door last January, walked undetected all the way to the cafeteria and attacked a student. We had dangerous people roaming the halls, the type of people we have lockdown drills for. The administration recognized this danger, and the effort was underway to ensure each student would carry an identifier.
Unlike Yondr pouches, this was not a policy students could casually circumvent: Either they had their ID, or they didn’t. And yet, here we are today, when a student actually presenting their ID badge is a surprising sight.
Gone are the days of teachers calling out to a student in the hallway, motioning for an ID to be donned and a phone to be put away. Just a couple of weeks ago, I walked into the bathroom and took out my phone. A security guard followed me in, nodded indifferently at my device, and said, “At least you’ve only got it out in here.” It’s effortless for students to break the rules now; we just have to do nothing, and nothing will be done to us.
Let’s also remember that those policies required students to pack two additional items in the morning, and waking up at 7 a.m. doesn’t guarantee that your ID and Yondr pouch find their way into a backpack. Lost Yondr pouches still incur a $20 fee, and the cost of a new ID is $5. The hassle of replacing these items was demoralizing enough, and the potential fees were an insult to the injury.
Students no longer care. Teachers no longer care. The administration doesn’t seem to care, either. Time, stress and money were poured into Yondr pouch and ID acquisition and enforcement, and now all that’s left are a few stragglers with that red ribbon hanging from their neck. As soon as students push back, the administration seems to just hang its head and raise the white flag.
I, too, am a victim of the fatigue that has gripped the school; it couldn’t matter less to me whether the administration doubles down on the phone and ID policy, or continues to disregard it and leaves it to rot.
A version of this editor’s note appears in print on page 2 of Volume 96, Issue 3, published Dec. 15, 2025.
