Plan for students to carry ID cards faces opposition

Wednesday, June 3, 1998 | 10:54 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- A suggestion that public school students must carry identification cards has raised strong objections from conservative groups who see this as a further infringement on individual freedom.

The issue arose Tuesday at a meeting of a legislative study committee which is studying ways to improve ways to deal with student truancy and for funding for disabled students.

Janine Hansen, president of Eagle Forum, told the committee this proposal smacks of "Nazi Germany where you had to show papers to move on the streets."

She said she worried about police officers harassing students on the street, requiring them to show identification cards. It's unconstitutional, she said, to stop somebody on the street without probably cause.

"It gets the students used to answering to government," said Hansen, a leading conservative spokeswoman during the Nevada Legislature. "It gives police an excuse to harass and stop children."

Hansen was joined in her criticism by Leslie Porter of the Alliance for Children for Educational Excellence who voiced the same objections.

Assembly- woman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, who heads the committee, disagreed with Hansen and Porter, saying identification cards would protect the students from harassment.

"This would give the kids some sense of protection so if the police did stop them ..., they (the students) could say, 'Hey, I'm at this school or that school and it gives them some protection.'"

Giunchigliani said she was under the misunderstanding at the last legislative session that every school required an identification card for students.

"I found out that they don't provide them at every school. The irony is that in every county for the purposes of dances, reduced lunch and free lunch program, you have to have a student ID. That's why I didn't think it would be as controversial.

"I don't support any type of Gestapo tactics. I don't think that is what we were trying to do but we will take their concerns into consideration."

The idea came from a truancy program in California schools which started a daytime curfew for students. "What they found out was that 38 percent of the kids were committing crimes during the school day. So they instituted a daytime curfew with allowance for use of IDs."

The committee will meet next month to take final action on proposals to be submitted to the 1999 Legislature. The committee has held six meetings to discuss its proposal -- this was the first time Hansen, who said she never received an agenda about the previous meetings, was present.

The committee also will consider a proposal to allow school administrators to reject a parental excuse for a student's absence from school.

Giunchigliani said some parents keep their children home for such things as babysitting and then give them a written excuse to present to the teacher. At year-around schools, some parents take their children out for two weeks during the summer so they can go on vacation.

"You can't have a parent take a student out of school and keep him out," Giunchigliani said.

But Hansen complained that if the school administrator had the power to reject an excuse from the parent for the student's absence than it "creates a police state where the government owns our children."

She said it was the responsibility of the parents to decide the excused absences. This suggestion, she said, "transfers basic responsibility to the state from the parents."

Giunchigliani, a school teacher in Las Vegas, indicated some type of compromise suggestion might be crafted on the excused absence issue.