The rules of Grayslake North High School have slowly started to change throughout the past few years. With safety being the biggest priority this year, more rules were added.

Safety has always been a number one concern, but the rules this year have been changing and began to be more strict. The main rules the staff are concerned about is the “no hoods” rule and wearing an ID.

“You know what I think is a very practical safety rule. Two things I can think of are hoods and wearing your ID. Need to know you belong. You know, unfortunately, we live in a society where things go terribly wrong at school sometimes,” said dean Linda Vecchie

With hoods and ID rules being implemented, they are also the most broken along with students being tardy to classes. Multiple teachers and staff have expressed that being tardy has increased throughout the years.

“I still see a lot of students tardy all the time. Like that final bell rings, that’s when kids finally start moving to class. I think that’s the rule that’s often broken,” said hubrarian Tom New

Other teachers think that students keeping their hoods down and IDs on are the most common broken rules.

“In the same light, I would say, you know, wearing hoods and wearing IDs are some broken rules,” said teacher Alex McKenzie.

The implementation of the rules was an overall community decision made from a handbook that the deans and administrators came up with.

“The student handbook every year, we sit down with its dean administrators, there’s usually some teacher volunteers, student volunteers, parents, people from district office and we with Central as well, and we go through the whole entire handbook and look at what needs to be changed what doesn’t need to be changed,” Vecchie said.

There’s many ways to handle discipline for someone who doesn’t follow the rules. First offenses can result in a chat with one’s dean or more serious acts could have consequences like a school suspension.

“Because depending on what the rule is, there could be a greater degree of consequence or a greater level of consequence. If you are skipping class, and you know, I don’t know exactly what the consequences are, but I know that these are conversations with the deans and they take care of that,” McKenzie said.

From a dean’s perspective, Mrs. Vecchie also explains what could happen when students break the rules. Graduated discipline is a method where consequences become more considerable. Like a one on one talk with the student versus a call home, or a detention to suspension. Linda Vecchie explains more in depth about what graduated discipline is.

“So we have what’s called a graduated discipline…So the first time something goes wrong, it’s usually just a conversation. So let’s say something goes wrong in class. Your teacher is going to have a conversation with you, then your teacher might call home, then your teacher might refer you to the dean’s office where we’re going to have you know, a more serious private conversation and a phone call home then maybe a detention or a lunch detention from there, you know, maybe in school suspension, maybe out of school suspension,” Vecchie said.