What’s Wrong with our IDs

It bears our name and swipes us in for school, and yet, our Student IDs are sitting at the unpopular table. With the school abound with stories of discount denials, accusations of falsification, and worse of all, encounters with police, it would seem that parts of the outside world views our piece of plastic as a childish and useless fake.

The Student Committee before the break held hearings on the issues during their weekly meetings. There, one heard stories about when a student was told by a cashier at a clothing store that her ID was fake. They also heard what happened to John Larizadeh ’16 who, twice in the previous school year, was stopped by police who suspected that he was using a stolen student MetroCard. When he showed the officers his student ID, they assumed it was fake. While he faced no ticket or jail time from either of these incidents, the refrain was the same, get a valid ID with a birthdate, or we’ll call your parents.

I reached out to the Community Affairs Officer of the Ninth Precinct, the precinct responsible for our school’s area, for a comment. The message has not been returned. In the meantime, the Committee has sent out a proposal to the Student Faculty Council requesting that future identification have more information.

While listening in these hearings, something kept ringing in my mind, “How bad could this be?” All of us have to use identification to get into secured buildings and take the upcoming SATs. What a shame and disgrace it would be if every Grace junior were denied access to the biggest standardized test since the ISEE. Then again, this is what we were given. Could the administration have been so careless as to give us half-finished IDs? I decided to investigate.

Part of the case the Student Committee has been building against the administration has been an argument of comparison. Other student IDs, like the one from Andover shown in the Student Committee hearings, feature the name of the student, a picture of the student, a picture of Andover’s campus, the current school year, the student’s graduation year, the student’s entry year, and, a birthdate. However, that argument neglects variation. In NYC, many schools have different approaches to information on IDs. Brearley doesn’t provide birthdates on their IDs, but they do provide an address and a phone number, which Andover neglects to have. Trinity doesn’t even bother with a phone number. They also don’t provide a birthdate. But most notable or scary was the example of Poly Prep. There is a picture of the student in question, Maya Terry, and the school’s badge takes up a good chunk of the page.

But past the current school year and the current grade of the student, this ID has almost as little information as one issued by Grace. You would think after comparing both IDs that Poly Prep also has issues with their IDs, that many in New York consider their official school ID fake, and thus cannot take the SATs or receive student discounts. You would be wrong. When I asked Maya about student IDs, discounts, and the dreaded SAT, she said she had no problem. She already took the SAT, using this and her admission ticket, the thing one fills out when registering for the SAT and cannot be admitted into a testing site without. Notably, the admission ticket does have a birthday, along with the address of your home, like mine for example. But the SAT still requires a valid photo ID, and Maya’s fit the bill.

When I continued my conversation with Maya, she mentioned that she was also able to get a discount with this ID at Apple. Of all places, Apple. It’s not like they offer discounts every day, technology doesn’t come cheap, but apparently they consider Maya’s ID, and most likely ours, valid. I double checked this at the Apple Store in Grand Central to see if I was mishearing. The bad news was that I couldn’t get a discount with my ID. The strange news was that it wasn’t because I had bad ID; I didn’t have enough ID. Apple’s policy requires a state ID as well as a school ID. Their rationale is that student IDs in general don’t have expiration dates and ID numbers in a government database. As far as valid student IDs go, my ID, which I showed them, was good enough for half of their process.

By this time, this kind of news was not new. To my surprise, the Subway closest to the chapel took my ID as is and offered a 10% discount. If only I had money. I thought that was just a fluke, so at the start of spring break, I decided to take a little museum tour on Museum Mile to see how many times I could fail to get a discount. Of the five I saw, three required payment to enter. Of those three, all of them saw my student ID as valid for student discounts. The Metropolitan Museum of Art let me in for free as a New York City high school student. I asked if they were going to ask for a birthdate, but they said no. The Guggenheim gave me their discount, half the money I would need to pay without my ID. The Jewish Museum on Museum Mile gave me their discount too, again, half the cost. At this point, the museums had closed, but the point was clear. My search to be told to get better ID would get nowhere.

So there I was with a problem. How could stories like the clothing cashier exist if I had found no other evidence to substantiate it. So far, in fact, Poly Prep’s ID alone deviates from common practice in school IDs. What makes a Poly ID more real than a Grace ID?

I thought back to the examples, Andover, Brearley, Trinity, Poly, College Board, and others that I haven’t even mentioned, and something struck me. What all of these IDs have in common was their text size. Their text size compared to the available space on the card looked small when put next to our IDs. A Grace ID has our badge overhead with our picture to the right and to the left in giant block letters our name and the current school year. In comparison, Poly Prep’s is much smaller. Admittedly, more information would warrant smaller text, but then again, Poly has little more information to offer.

Perhaps, and this is another theory to test – is the problem with our IDs the design? Many logos and advertisements for events at Grace have been blessed with good design. Others have not, and people notice that, and sometimes tell you to your face. What else could explain the common complaint in the Committee hearing that our IDs “look childish?” After all, nothing looks more childish than big letters that look like a four year old computer drew them in the equivalent of typeface.

But I’ll leave that part to the Student-Faculty Council. Until then, I’ll happily enjoy a toasted roast beef 10% off at Subway.