Due to the large demand of students needing their lanyards to be reprinted each morning, the school has increased the original price from $6 per lanyard to $10 to cover the cost of the supplies, which consists of the lanyard itself, the plastic cover, and the ID that uses colored ink.
“A lot of students seem to think that we are increasing the price of the lanyards as a punishment,” Assistant Principal Eric Gant said. “It’s truly not what it is…the supplies are really expensive. Four bags of lanyards are around $500 and we need to pay for the colored ink which needs to be refilled every 7-8 business days, or almost every two weeks, which is another $100.”
Gant reports that on average 25-30 lanyards needed to be printed each morning, and almost 1,300 lanyards were remade during the first semester.
“It’s a really long process for us here in the office,” Gant said.“We have to obviously reprint the ID, put it in the case, put the lanyard on it, do that about 25-30 times, and then on top of that we have to deliver them to the different classes.Our goal this semester is to hopefully be able to lower those numbers down to under 10 lanyards each morning.”
Administration hopes that paying for an extra lanyard will help students develop a routine readiness in the morning.
“We know that if a student forgets their lanyard, most times they never actually lose it, it’s usually somewhere at home,” Gant said. “However, if a student is consistently losing their lanyard, if we get to reprint it for them it kind of reinforces that they should keep an extra one in their backpack, or in the car, and then they will have extras and not have to keep buying more.”
Most students originally heard of the price increase from the morning announcements in class.
“At first, I thought it was supposed to be a punishment when I saw it on the announcements,” junior Jenny Nie said. “I feel like it would make sense though because in the morning I see a lot of people wearing green lanyards, and even in my classes many days people would have a new one delivered.”
Ultimately, administrators hope that the price increase incentivizes students to wear their lanyards to avoid any further punishment for continual offenses.
“So far, we have not had any student reach the point of ninth or tenth lanyards,” Gant said. “We want it to be like, in the morning, you put on your shirt, pants, shoes, and then your lanyard… Hopefully we never have to get to the point of a more severe punishment since we want students to remember to wear the lanyards on their own.”
