berkeley high has an open campus, meaning that students can come and go as they please. in theory, outsiders aren't supposed to be able to, but during my tenure there the campus wasn't physically laid out to accommodate access control, so the administration had no real way to keep random people out. the adults, concerned about student safety, experimented with various ways to partially close the campus. none of them worked, because they all required the consent of the governed, and we never gave it.

i don't envy the administration here. the school is adjacent to the downtown of a city full of weird people with public transit access to a region full of more weird people. learning to interact with weird people is, of course, an important part of growing up, but just letting 800 high school freshmen do whatever they want with whomever they want whenever they want carries a long-tail risk that could reasonably keep a school administrator up at night. you don't even need to argue for physical barriers to truancy (although i'm sure a lot of adults did) - you can build a solid case on safety concerns alone.

but high schoolers, of course, gave zero shits about that. we just wanted to go get shitty chinese food downtown during lunch and smoke weed in the park across the street. the campus had some communal space for hanging out, but not enough to accommodate 3200 students, and we morally objected to being cooped up anyway. cities are for living, not being warehoused.

the most memorable idea the administration floated was the dumbest: closing the campus for freshman only. the plan required all students to wear their ids visibly, which would have the dual benefit of making unauthorized visitors obvious and enabling staff to keep freshman from leaving campus during the day. you know, in theory. i have no idea how that second one was supposed to work, given that it would have required the school's five security guards or whatever to somehow do badge inspections of literally thousands of students each day on a twelve acre campus that lacked controllable ingress or egress points. it never got tested, because the student response to the new directive to wear our badges was immediate, confident, and universal: "lol no."

we wanted to come and go as we pleased and we enjoyed random people wandering around. this new chore would eliminate those two things, and ignoring it would obviously be inconsequential, so why wouldn't we? (what were they gonna do? punish all of us?) knowing the stick was a joke, some teachers limply attempted to tempt us with the carrot - granting extra credit for badge burnishment and the like - but you could tell their hearts weren't in it, and the whole thing quietly died out after a month or two.

what strikes me most about the memory was how reflexive the student response was. there was no worry, no bargaining, no strategizing. the new rule was self-evidently stupid, so of course nobody was going to follow it. we instead speculated about why the administration was trying to implement such a brain-dead policy in the first place. a bunch of high schoolers could tell it was dead on arrival - why couldn't the adults?

it is a fun coda that seven years later this idiotic idea got floated again - apparently, this time, by cops. fortunately, the superintendent at the time appeared to have his head screwed on straight:

[Superindendent] Huyett said...identification badges will have to include “dialogue at the school” before that happens.

i did not miss that the headline characterizes this proposal as "being considered" even though it appears to have been immediately rejected by actual educators. an important part of journalism is reflexive deference to police, after all. and don't skip the article's finale:

Police responded in force to sighting of a student with a gun in his waistband near the campus Wednesday but the youth left and no gun was found after officers detained three young men.

don't think for a minute that berkeley high kids' distrust of authority is solely from youth rebellion. when you tell them that a new rule is for their safety, this is what they think of: random boys being detained by cops for shit they didn't do.