The ID scanners used in the morning as students come into school will now also be implemented during lunch periods.
“They may not be ready the first day, but before the first week is out, I’m sure they’ll be in place,” Principal Stanley Teitel said.
Each student’s lunch period will now end at the end of his or her assigned period, excluding the four minutes allotted for getting to the next class. Thus, if a student returns to school during the passing period, he or she will be marked late, although his or her next class would not have actually started. However, students will now be allowed to leave the school for lunch during passing.
“I can only give you the four minutes on one side or the other,” Teitel said. “I chose to give you the four minutes at the beginning of the period.”
Teitel distributed a letter to all staff members and the Student Union (SU) June 13, 2007 to inform them of his plan, but did not tell students and parents about the decision.
“The SU has always been against the scanners since it was first posed a couple of years ago,” senior and SU President Jamila Ma said. “We told the administration that we are fully against this.”
The scanners were first introduced on March 24, 2006. Students wary of the implementation of the scanners since it would limit their freedom and invade their privacy threatened to protest on April 4, 2006. The protest would consist of a slowdown in the morning and a march to City Hall.
“I never understood from the SU how this invades your privacy,” Teitel said. “All it does for me is tell me as the principal who’s not in the building in every given period. I now know that I have to worry about you because you’re not in the building with me where I can protect you. You’re now in the streets. That’s a problem.”
To resolve the dispute, the SU and the administration agreed to a compromise that included the guarantee that scanners would only be used in the morning and not during lunch periods.
“We had an agreement last year between the SU and the administration that the scanners would only be used in the morning,” former SU President George Zisiadis (’07) said. “What happened was that Mr.Teitel came out of the blue and said that we’ll put it in anyways [for lunch].”
In exchange for the use of the scanners during lunch, the administration agreed to consider allowing students to leave school during their free periods. But this proposal was rejected.
“It turned out that, apparently, the scanners couldn’t be configured to let students out during their free periods,” Zisiadis said.
The SU also approached the administration at the end of the 2006-2007 school year with a proposal to open up the third, seventh, eighth and ninth floors for students, but this idea was also rejected. The administration feared that students would cause too much noise and create too much of a mess.
“It wasn’t a crazy demand,” Zisiadis said. “It was a feasible plan for student space. [The SU] tried giving something back to the students [and] tried to work something out, and that didn’t happen.”
“What’s the point of having a Student Union if the administrators are just [going to] overrule them all the time?” junior Paul Park said.
The scanners will provide instant information for the administration on the number of students both outside and inside Stuyvesant. They will also inform teachers if students are exploiting their lunch privileges to skip classes.
“[The scanners] certainly help the administration to be more aware of where the kids are, like who’s around and unaccounted for,” Assistant Principal English Eric Grossman said. “There is a value in knowing where everybody is.”
But, said Ma, “There is such a small percentage of students that [skip classes], and it’s unnecessary to put [the scanners] in use for the whole student body,” Ma said. “I’m sure that there is another way to put students into class.”
Many students already find the scanners a hassle. “It’s just another annoying procedure,” junior Zak Shtulberg said.
But others find it to be almost the same as a normal day. “We already have to take our ID cards out to show them that it’s our lunch period,” Park said. “It’ll take about the same amount of time for the guards to check as swiping.”