Almost nobody likes them. A lot of people hate them. But, most have learned to live with them as they are here to stay. For all of USD 266, lanyards have become a part of our daily lives.
“We started working on this late last year,” Maize USD 266 Executive of Health, Safety and Prevention, Tim Brant said. “One of the things I noticed was that we had a difficult time determining who was supposed to be in our buildings, who should be there, who shouldn’t be there. So one of the things we looked at was lanyards.”
Ideally, there should be no need for lanyards; but, there have been incidents recently around Kansas that have raised a need for them. Brant said there were situations where staff had no idea who people in the schools were, but they had a valid reason for the visit. Lanyards were implemented to make it simpler to identify who was an intruder in the schools.
The introduction of this policy brought some issues. The biggest of which was that wearing lanyards at school was not heavily enforced. After the first semester, this changed with the addition of charging students for a lanyard each time they were caught without one. The charge is cheap: $3 for the ID and $3 for the lanyard, but for repeat offenders this adds up. If you are a Maize South student, you also have a detention to go with the charge if you are found without one.
Another concern was the durability of the ID cards.
“We noticed, your ID card, for example, is peeling apart,” Brant said. “This last week we looked at some new ID card examples, and our goal is to upgrade the quality of the cards, and get it to where it’s more durable.”
In most cases, durability is what mattered, although in a few it was better to not wear a lanyard at all. Certain situations may arise during classes that may warrant them to be taken off.
“Safety-wise it made me nervous,” Maize Career Academy Culinary Instructor, Cara Poole said. “I don’t want to cook them or get them stuck in a mixer, just OSHA and safety rules.”
It has been left up to the judgment of the teacher whether or not the situation calls for taking them off.
The most noteworthy complaint amongst students was that they hated having to remember to wear them. Some students left them in their cars or in their backpacks.
“As annoying as it is to be reminded and everything, if you just keep it on you or if you drive to school and just keep it in your car, there really should be no reason for forgetting it,” MHS Junior Gemma Jones said. “It can be annoying, but just wear it so you’re not getting in trouble.”
Everybody at USD 266 is expected to wear lanyards.
“I mean, even I have to wear one,” Brant said. “I encounter the same problems that you do. Same frustrations. I try to tell myself, they are important. They help us identify who belongs in our buildings, and that’s a huge security feature. We need to know who belongs and who doesn’t.”
