THE
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Non-Profit Organization U.S. POSTAGE PAID Sacramento, CA Permit No. 1668
@scdsoctagon
VOL.42 NO.5 • Sacramento Country Day School • 2636 Latham Drive, Sacramento • February 12, 2019
Large windows, lack of cameras to remain BY MOHINI RYE
QUI EST-CE? French teacher Richard Day helps freshman and French I student Daisy Zhou review the continents and countries in her textbook, “C’est à Toi!: Level One.” Day’s blue identifcation badge was not a part of his couture in the past. PHOTO BY JACQUELINE CHAO
Teacher identification badges, updated gate protocol part of new regulations to improve campus security BY MOHINI RYE
the school’s administrative team (comprised of faculty from departicture today’s Country Day ments across the lower, middle and campus: mostly walled and high school) has been using KSL’s gated through the lower and recommendations to revamp school middle school but unfenced security policy. Heeding KSL’s advice, the adminin the high school — nothing sepaistrative team implemented several rating the inside from the outside. new safety regulaAn open area. tions, which were Now imagine the sent out via the Jan. 18 school fully enclosed. A nice That will likely thing about Friday email. From now on, the one day be reality — this campus is kindergarten playalthough it could be ground gate will reyears before any con- that it’s open, but main closed unless struction happens. it can also invite used as an emergency According to head of some problems.” school Lee Thomsen, —Sue Nellis exit; only the lower school gates will be enclosing the campus used during lower is part of the school’s school drop-off; doors long-term Campus Master Plan, but full enclosure is to the lower school building outside just one big change at the end of a the gate will remain locked when list of interim steps to improve cam- the reception desk is unstaffed; and identification badges will be worn pus security. Since a visit last fall by Knowl- by employees at all times. A Jan. 29 poll of 114 high school edge Saves Lives (KSL), a group specializing in campus safety training, students showed 89 supported the
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changes, while 25 opposed at least one of them. The change garnering the most disapproval was the identification badges, which employees are supposed to wear on campus. Several students, such as sophomore Erin Wilson, called them “pointless.” “We all know who the teachers are,” Wilson said. “I don’t have a major thing against (the change), but I just don’t see the need.” Some students, however, had deeper objections to the rule. “(The ID cards) add a degree of separation,” sophomore Nate Leavy said. “Especially as a lifer, I feel like I know these teachers on a personal level — it’s such a small school that teachers like (first-grade teacher Sue) Goodwin still remember my name when we bump into each other, even after nine years. “Name tags just seem impersonal to me.” But both history teacher Sue Nellis and Latin teacher Jane Batarseh
said they considered the badges useful, especially given Country Day’s physically open campus. According to Nellis, teacher identification had already been discussed before KSL’s visit for that very reason. “A nice thing about this campus is that it’s open, but it can also invite some problems,” Nellis said. Batarseh agreed, adding that the badges are a “sad necessity” due to the rise in school shootings. “(The need for badges) is a sign of our hypervigilant and fearful society,” she said. Batarseh added that identification is useful in dangerous situations because students or visitors needing help could find a lanyard-wearing teacher easily. “The downside, though, is someone coming on campus — a shooter — and seeing a person of authority and saying, ‘I’ll kill it,’” she said. Meanwhile, Nellis said her only issue with the ID is that it’s easy to
SECURITY page 3 >>
School administration scraps Cav Club; PA adopts ‘friendraising’ BY CHARDONNAY NEEDLER A sophomore comes up to Student Council adviser Valerie Velo, confused about a $25 fee for Winter Ball on Feb. 2. “Do I have to pay?” she asks. “I’m part of Cav Club.” Valerie says she has to, but the change comes as a surprise to many others. That’s new this year. Former Parents’ Association (PA) head Lindsey Sackheim created Cavalier Club (Cav Club) as a membership program for students and parents willing to pay a yearly $150 fee in exchange for free entrance to almost every on-campus activity. A Cav Club membership waived $25 dance fees, paid for access to the Fall Family Festival and got students free spirit gear at the beginning of the year. But at the end of the 2017-18 school year, PA co-presidents Lainie Josephson and Michelle Kessel-Harbart approached the administration with a
plan to dissolve Cav Club. Josephson said. “There are two types of ‘raising’: The PA co-presidents convinced head of school fundraising — raising money — or ‘friendraising’ Lee Thomsen, he said. — building a tighter community. “Cav Club felt like one more ask of parents,” “We loved ‘friendraising.’ It felt a lot more Thomsen said. “Schools suggest that if you charge comfortable for us, as it helps get more people intuition and have an annual fund and the auction, volved in our kids’ school.” you don’t need another paid program. Eliminating Cav Club encouraged more par“You don’t want to ask people for $20 here and ents to volunteer at school events, she continued. $100 there.” “Cav Club But according was slightly teCav Club was slightly tedious to Josephson, savdious because ing parents from it’d be hard to because it’d be hard to get longpaying extraneous term volunteers to be in charge of it.” get long-term prices wasn’t her —Lainie Josephson volunteers to be original goal. in charge of it,” Josephson said Josephson said. eliminating Cav “We didn’t want Club happened “organically” after the co-pres- to nickel-and-dime parents. There were 400-ish idents read articles from the National Associa- families who signed up and needed paperwork tion of Independent Schools about “guidelines to that volunteers had to go through, 400 T-shirts to ‘friendraising.’” “So many schools were going that direction,” CAV CLUB page 4 >>
A Jan. 29 poll of 114 high schoolers asked students if there should be more changes to school security than those instituted Jan. 18. While many wrote “none,” two common answers appeared: remedying the large windows in the high school and placing security cameras on campus. “For security, all-window classroom aren’t great,” senior Chloe Collinwood wrote. Sophomore Nate Leavy agreed. “They’re practically entire walls,” he said. “During a lockdown drill when I was in (Latin teacher Jane Batarseh’s) class, we realized how difficult it was to find a position in the room without a direct line of sight to the windows.” Head of school Lee Thomsen, however, said the large windows are likely to stay. “One of the attractions of the high school space is how open those rooms feel,” he said. “Otherwise, the feeling inside the rooms would be negatively impacted.” And Thomsen said installing cameras is unlikely. “Getting good cameras everywhere you need is expensive, and monitoring takes time and energy,” he said. Thomsen also mentioned how much ground cameras would need to cover. “I can’t even begin to think how many cameras we’d need,” he said. Meanwhile, history teacher Sue Nellis suggested identification badges for students. “I wonder if the next step (for security) will be students needing something to identify them,” she said. Thomsen said he didn’t see the need for student identification but that it’s an “open question.” “I don’t think you need first graders wearing IDs, but one could make an argument that maybe high schoolers could,” he said. Ultimately, picking safety projects is a matter of priority, according to Thomsen. “Each year we look at the different needs on campus and prioritize how the school will allocate money for those projects,” he said. “There are literally dozens of things we wish we could do, but we simply don’t have unlimited funds to do all those projects.”
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