'Must-wear' student IDs roil a town

There's usually not much to report from this town of 17,000 in the foothills of southeastern Missouri. Crime is low, traffic is slow, and the locals like to point visitors to the town's namesake, a blanket of tulip poplar trees hugging the bluff of the Black River.

But 1,300 students cram the hallways of Poplar Bluff's only public high school, and superintendent Randy Winston is the first to admit that it is nearly impossible to know everybody by face let alone by name.

And yet, when he announced in late October that all students and staff must wear ID badges while on school grounds, a few of the parents - and then a slew of students - put up quite a fuss.

Some called it Orwellian, citing Big Brother and his omnipresent eye; others declared it a nuisance, saying only visitors should have to wear badges. One father even pulled his two daughters from the school in protest.

Across the country student IDs are fast becoming the norm - while far more invasive security measures have already been implemented, such as random drug testing, cameras, and metal detectors. Many experts are left wondering: Why the fuss in Poplar Bluff?

In this case, even the American Civil Liberties Union sides with the school's right to insist that students both wear and display ID badges.

"Does the school have a right to know your name?" asks Denise Leiberman, legal director of the ACLU's St. Louis branch. "Absolutely. And does it have the right to require you present it? Yeah, I think so."

Poplar Bluff may be somewhat unusual in that it is a small town that hasn't yet had to safeguard against many of the problems that America's larger metropolitan areas have long faced.

Many residents feel immune to everything from street crime to terrorist attacks. Perhaps the community is merely going through growing pains, observers note, as it struggles to come to terms with what larger towns have already accepted as "the new normal."

"We live in cautious times," says David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group in Philadelphia that advocates for civil liberties in schools. "And some safety measures are effective, and some are purely cosmetic. To me, ID badges are kind of like the beeping of trucks when they back up. How many lives has that actually saved? But now every truck of any size beeps. It's one of those things that is slapped on to give the appearance of being careful."

But Mr. Winston doesn't understand why, when surrounding communities smaller than Poplar Bluff have required ID badges without hue and cry, students and parents are so concerned about wearing what is essentially a library card. The badge includes a photo, the school year, the person's status as student or staff, and a bar code used for checking out books.

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