Mornings at Oak Park and River Forest High School look different this year. As students enter the building, they are greeted by the staccato beeping of scanners registering students’ IDs. 

On Aug. 19, OPRF implemented a new security policy that requires students to have their IDs scanned before entering the building. Scanning has become a matter of routine after an initial rollout with long lines at school entrances.

Students can enter through doors 7 and 10 as well as through Door 4, more commonly known as the Welcome Center. With the implementation of the policy, Door 9 was closed as an entrance due to lack of use, according to Kristen Devitt, the director of campus safety. 

The policy was adopted to track attendance and more closely monitor security, according to Devitt. With ID scanning, it is easier for security to have a handle on who is actually in the building, making attendance easier and the building safer.  

“It’s more difficult for those people to sneak past us,” Devitt said. “And we’re able to catch them as we’re getting people to come into the building and say, ‘No, you can’t come in here.’”

“Hopefully it’ll stop people from doing things because…they know the schools would have solid proof that they are in the school building,” said senior Sofia Fitzgerald, adding that waiting in line to get an ID scanned can be frustrating. 

“It’s made me a lot more stressed out in the morning because I have to rush and make sure that I get to school earlier,” Fitzgerald said, describing her experiences during the first weeks of the ID policy. “The first day the policy was implemented, I showed up 10 minutes late to class, despite getting to school 15 minutes before the first bell rang, and my class is also on the second floor, and very close to the door I enter from.” 

Maia Zeidman, a history teacher at OPRF who has a first period world history class, was directly affected by the new procedures in the morning. “I think as we continue to try to navigate all this stuff, we’re just going to have some learning pains,” she said. “And that’s OK, because if the end result is that we can live in a safer society where people feel safer in school, I’m a happy camper.” 

As of now, lines have become more manageable with there being minimal congestion at the doors, although lines can begin to form as it gets closer to 8 a.m. 

According to Devitt, security has worked to fix problems as they have come up, including adding a third person to Door 7. For now, students and staff are adapting to the new policy. 

“I think that no policy is perfect,” said James Bell, an English teacher who has a first period AP English Literature and Composition class. “There are always going to be loopholes in the ways in which we try to provide safety in this building, but I think that if there are enough systems in place, there’ll be enough overlap that together, those systems will create a place where we can just focus on education.”