Next week Oak Park and River Forest High School will open for a new year. And it will open under new rules. The campus will be closed for all freshman and sophomores and for some upperclassmen.
It is an odd and imperfect hybrid that the school board adopted last spring in partial response to community concern over drug and alcohol use by students over the course of the school day. We would have much preferred having the school campus simply closed for all students. It would have been more effective and more simply enforceable.
That said, the decision by the school board was sincere, and the effort by school officials to find ways to quickly initiate the effort is admirable. Now it is time for students, parents, teachers and the broader community to unite in backing this plan.
We are done, for the moment, criticizing this decision as a halfway measure. We’d ask critics of the new policy who think that closing the campus in any way will prove ineffective in addressing the abuse problem to give this some time to take hold.
None of the people who have worked so hard to raise our awareness of the drug abuse problem at the school have ever suggested that closing the campus — fully or partly — was a panacea. It is but one tool in trying to structure and protect our kids.
The onus, though, is also on school officials to diligently enforce the new policies. We’ve seen other such efforts to tighten discipline fall by the wayside at OPRF. Students will test the limits of this closed campus. It is up to OPRF staff to prove they are serious.
Let’s give this a sincere chance and see how the policy evolves in the coming years.