For students who commonly wear hoods to stay warm or comfortable, the no hoods policy may have flown right over their heads.
When junior Ryan Quinlan enters the school, paraprofessionals often remind him to remove his hood.
“Sometimes I’m just wearing it as I come in the building because it’s cold out or it was raining or something, and I’ll take it off and I’ll leave it off,” said Quinlan. “But if I want to have it on, once the teacher [or] whoever told me to take it off is not there anymore, I put it back on.”
According to William Eike, assistant principal dean of students, the no hoods policy was implemented in response to an incident at Glenbrook South within the past six years when a former student came into the building wearing a hood and started a physical altercation with another student.
“When [the district] tried to identify who was all involved, it made it very difficult because the one young individual, as well as others, had their hoods up, and we were trying to identify who’s involved in the situation,” Eike said.
Since then, the deans have asked students to put their hoods down when entering the building, and the policy exists so staff members can identify students, Eike said.
A message from the Deans’ Office reminded students to not wear hoods inside the building in the Feb. 11 and Feb. 18 weekly update emails.
“[The no hoods policy is] one of those things that kind of ebb and flows where it gets enforced for a while, and then people start to either kind of forget about it or it becomes a little more popular amongst certain groups of kids or classes of kids,” said Eike. “And then we have to address it again, and it’s kind of like otherpolicies to where every now and then we have to reinforce, ‘Hey, we were asking you not to do this.’”
According to Quinlan, hoods do not disrupt his learning when he is in class.
“If anything, they help because they’re more comfortable … [a hood] helps you focus more,” Quinlan said.
According to Eike, hoods can come up and cover students’ heads and half their faces, but students are permitted to wear hats because hats leave a lot of a student’s face or upper body area available to be identified.
“I want people to know it’s a safety issue,” said Eike. “Because when situations do arise, we try to do our best to identify people. So we would just ask that students comply when a teacher or security or any adult asks them if they could please take their hood down.”