“Make sure your bags are open and ready!”
It’s 7:10 a.m. I walk to the front door and hear those words as clear as day. The daily search is about to commence.
This year, CHS is doing daily searches of every CHS student - a big step up in security from last year.
You may be asking why, but it may be a very important precaution to take for the safety of our school.
“We want to keep all the students safe. We don’t want anyone to bring in anything illegal,” said Security Officer Johnson.
Students should be prepared for daily checks for the rest of the school year. The school may be a safer place because of them, but what if something is snuck in?
“The con [of daily checks] is that sometimes you can’t get everyone,” said Security Officer Boykins.
The main complaint that students have about daily checks is the amount of time that they have to get to class in the morning.
“My first block is in the greenhouse, which is already a two minute walk from the front of the building, and I’m held up because of the lines and then them going through your bag. It just takes a lot of time,” said sophomore Aniyah Smith.
Privacy is also a big concern.
“I feel like it is an invasion of privacy when I go through the doors and they do not have the right to go through my bag. There is no point to them [the searches] because all they do is unzip my bag and look in it, just to say they did it,” said junior Kennedy Brinkley.
The students who have gone through the searches on the bus ramp as well as through the front door, have expressed that they are both completely different.
“They [the searches] are totally different. The front actually looks through your things, but when you go through the bus ramp, they just pat your bag and let you go through,” said senior Zoё Jordan.
Among the students that I have interviewed, the majority don’t feel safer; they feel that there is an invasion of privacy, that the amount of time that they have in the morning is reduced, and that the procedures are not the same every day.
“To me there isn’t really a procedure, like it’s different every day. Sometimes if it’s a good day they’ll let you go through. You stand in line and they won’t check your bags. Some days it’s really slow and takes 20 minutes to get through the door, because they are checking every person,” said bus rider Jaylin Drewry.
The daily checks are a new addition to Churchland High School, but is it too much, or not enough?
Photo: Aniyah Smith