As of April 22, the school police and administration put in place a ban that no bottles were permitted into the building unless they were clear or unopened. Students received an email with the news during eighth period on April 16. This ban came into effect after Easter break, confusing a lot of the students on why they enforced it so late in the year.
“As disappointing as it is, you can no longer bring coffee in the morning anymore, I understand the not-opened drinks when you first walk in because of the spills that have happened,” senior Isabelle Wolford said. “I feel slightly annoyed because warm water is gross, but I understand why they made the rule.”
The ban came about due to the reports of students bringing contraband into the building inside their water bottles, such as vapes and alcohol.
“I can completely understand why the school banned the water bottles; however, I would bring a water bottle to school everyday,” sophomore Nevaeh Long said. “I had to go buy a clear water bottle due to the ban. A few students’ bad actions are affecting me and my everyday life which is not fair.”
“We had seen a couple of incidents that were raising concerns about contraband being brought into school and the biggest concern when coming to the bottles is honestly the big Stanley cups and Yeti tumblers because they’re so big you can put a lot of stuff in them, and you can’t see in them,” Head Principal Andrew Neely said.
Though some students believe it’s too far into the year to enforce this rule, it’s something that has always been in the Code of Conduct.
“All the searches that we were doing were still having an epidemic of vapes and some of the other things we feel that are getting into the school,” police officer Gregory McNeal said. “It’s always been a policy about clear water bottles, but we weren’t checking any of the bottles, and some of the bottles were really big.”
The process to get into the building takes time with the searches. Including checks to each student’s water bottle could prolong the morning routine.
“When kids come in the line in the morning, we don’t have the time to open each one of them and make sure what’s in them,” Neely said. “That was the big concern about things being brought in the school that shouldn’t be brought in so we’re trying to tighten up to make sure everyone is safe.”
Over 100 hundred students would bring Stanleys and Owalas before the ban was in place, leaving the possibility of contraband coming in unknown.
“So we did a demonstration for the administration where we took a regular sized Stanley type cup, and we put items in it,” McNeal said. “ I came in and one of the other officers were both holding a cup, and it was a gift, not to me, but a gift to some of the staff at administration. And when I walked in, everybody at the table had cups, the same cups of students were bringing me. They said, ‘Oh, that’s a really nice cup.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m glad you brought that up.’ So I opened the cup, and I had a revolver in there, a 22 long rifle revolver, which is a handgun, and they were shocked, and Officer Riley was with me. He opened his, where he had several knives and a vape. I had a vape, a revolver and a knife in mine. So they decided that we should be enforcing the clear water bottle rule because there’s potential for people to carry things in because, first of all, you can’t see through them, and secondly, we aren’t checking them at all.”
The overall decision to remove the bottles wasn’t to take away their option to have water bottles, but to put the students’ safety ahead of everything else.
“I know when you first hear the rule you may feel it is restrictive, but I had to balance students versus safety, and it’s a lot of students in a small area that we try to keep safe. The vaping issue is honestly crazy,” Neely said. “We’re trying to really get a handle on it, and we’re seeing more and more vapes that aren’t just vapes but vapes with THC and that’s marijuana; we’ve got to get that under control.”
Due to situations that have happened, there is a potential to adding searches to the elementary students’ routine.
“At the elementary level, there are a lot of things that are going on that you may not know about; like we had a child that brought a knife, a butcher knife and a meat cleaver,” McNeal said. “You know what a meat cleaver is, really big, like a square one; you’ve only ever seen on TV. He had that in his backpack.”
In the future, the school plans to buy newer metal detectors that are able to detect weapons.
“They [the new metal detectors] will be a little different from the ones we have, and the reason that all came about was the shootings that involved high school students a few years back,” McNeal said. “So we thought that with all that, some of those players coming in and out of school, that there should probably be some kind of a search to keep everybody on the same page, keep everybody safe.”