By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 18, 2006; B01
The last thing any high school student wants is to be singled out.
So students at Montgomery County's largest high school are in an uproar over a new policy that requires them to wear color-coded IDs -- black for seniors, white for magnet kids and a particularly loud shade of yellow for students of limited English proficiency.
Ninth-graders at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring took particular umbrage at being forced to advertise their status with bright red badges and optional matching lanyards. Last week, after all, was Spirit Week, otherwise known as Freshman Hell Week.
The campus has been thrown into a state of rhetorical turmoil over the IDs, issued two weeks ago in 11 colors to denote various smaller learning "academies" within the 3,000-student campus.
The new policy "tags us like dogs," wrote Breton Sheridan, a junior, in one of hundreds of postings to various school Web sites.
Or, as sophomore Aisha Michael put it, "We look like Skittles now."
By color-coding children, school officials hoped to build a sense of identity -- and security -- in a school whose students have been divided into several smaller learning communities: maroon for future scientists, purple for diplomats in training, dark blue for entrepreneurs and so forth.
"What we did, we thought we were doing a good thing," Principal Phillip Gainous said.
But the new color system brought unintended consequences.
Students say the system amplifies differences that already divide teenagers of different academic and socioeconomic stripes.
As the staff of the Silver Chips student newspaper opined in an editorial, "Self-segregation is already an issue in the student body, and the formal distribution of color-coded IDs has essentially institutionalized the phenomenon."
At least three freshmen reported various forms of hazing: One was jumped at a bus stop; another was encircled by a menacing mob of upperclassmen; the third victim would not relate his sufferings in detail, Gainous said.
But the principal said freshmen actually suffered fewer hazing incidents this year than last. He doubts the color-coded badges were responsible.
"Every student in here knows who the ninth-graders are," he said. "They don't need an ID to tell them."
Students are required to carry IDs in a wide range of Washington area high schools. But Montgomery Blair is one of just a few that require students to wear them. An informal survey of local school systems uncovered just one other school, Gov. Thomas Johnson High School in Frederick, with such a rule.
Montgomery Blair students have been told to wear their IDs for several years, Gainous said. The concept of color-coding arose as a way to link students within the school's five academic academies.
The palette had to be broadened to accommodate this year's seniors, who do not participate in the newly formed academies; freshmen, who have yet to choose academies; students in two magnet programs and in the English-learners program; and staff.
Students were involved in those decisions, Gainous said.
Students in two advanced magnet programs at Montgomery Blair, who are screened for academic ability, say their brown and white badges only alienate them further from a school population already sensitive to such distinctions. Students in the English for Speakers of Other Languages program said they, too, felt singled out; Gainous allowed them to adopt the freshman red.
"A lot of these kids, they just want to keep a low profile and blend in," said Jeanne Philbin, whose daughter, an academically advanced sophomore, has taken to hanging her colored badge from a length of string rather than a color-coded lanyard.
Gainous said he believes that much of the student wrath is directed not at the colored badges so much as the penalties for not wearing them. Under the new rules, a student who leaves a badge at home faces a series of consequences ranging from a verbal warning to an in-school suspension. A student who intentionally defies the rule is considered insubordinate and faces much stricter penalties: detention for the first infraction, suspension for the second.
More than 600 students answered a pair of online polls by the student newspaper assessing the new policy. The largest group of respondents in one poll, nearly two-thirds, declared it a "hideous embarrassment." The opposing view, "awesome," garnered 6 percent.
