Seniors will no longer be allowed to use traditional paper lunch passes starting Oct. 12 in response to an increase in students caught with fake lunch passes.
Over the past two weeks, security caught seven juniors and three seniors with fake lunch passes. As a result, seniors will now have to use their senior ID to exit campus. Administration aims to make it more difficult for underclassmen and juniors to go out during lunch periods against school rules.
“The reason we have lunch passes is because we have to get the parents’ permission for them to go out, and we’ve always just associated the two,” principal Alan Goodwin said. “But we can still get parental permission and just keep a file and not give out a pass. We know that people can make fake IDs, but that will be less common.”
If the new policy is not sufficient, seniors may become additional eyes for security.
“Seniors will have to tell when they see underclassmen and juniors off campus,” Goodwin said. “I don’t like to put seniors in that position. We just need to tighten it up so people aren’t using these forged IDs.”
Students caught with the fake passes will receive two days of lunch detention. If students are caught a second time, they will most likely receive a longer lunch detention, security team leader Cherisse Milliner said. Also, seniors who take underclassmen out will lose their parking privileges.
Security identified the forged passes primarily because of the writing.
“They didn’t have my handwriting,” Milliner said. “Each student’s name on the pass should have my handwriting.”
They were also often the wrong color, size or material. Fake lunch passes are a bigger problem this year than they have been in previous years, Milliner said.
Despite the clear call from the student body to allow underclassmen to leave campus during lunch, the administration does not plan on changing the policy.
“There just isn’t time and space,” Goodwin said. “We can’t provide enough parking spaces for kids and it’s hard enough getting our seniors back on campus in time. It’s a senior privilege.”
Anonymous • Jan 21, 2023 at 9:57 am
Ah, forged passes… back in the days before personal computers, in middle school shop class, there was an option to lean Printing on a hand cranked press with manually set type.
Some of the entrepreneurial kids made printed hall passes on the same paper as the originals, provided by a kid swiping some of the paper from the office. There was a teacher who used a rubber stamp for his signature. An artsy kid carved a copy from a rubber eraser. The passes were nearly identical copies and the gang sold the passes for a dollar each and made loads of money – until the school was flooded with fake passes to the point where they had to get new ones printed on different paper. These kids were 12-13 years old. The ringleader got busted but his associates didn’t.
Steven • Aug 15, 2018 at 12:46 pm
Nooo! I guess this will happen when the cost of a Lunch Pass label is less than actual lunch!
Anonymous Poster • Oct 4, 2015 at 3:32 pm
While I strongly oppose the rebelliousness of underclassmen, such a solution would be rendered ineffective if the enforcement is as lax as it is now. It is self-evident that as long as you have closed lunch for 3/4 of the grade, there are people who are going to try to “open it.”