My opposition to requiring government-issued photo identification to vote only applies if a fee is charged for that government document. Requiring a government document for which a fee is charged to vote violates the Constitution’s 24th Amendment prohibiting a poll tax, and if a fee is charged I support a photo ID requirement to vote about as much as I support waiving the Fifth Amendment guaranteeing the right to property so that a politician’s home or office can be burglarized to fund a good cause. If government-issued photo identification is required but no fee is charged for that document, my opposition to requiring photo ID to vote would disappear.
It is thus ironic that the education establishment which opposes government-issued photo ID to vote requires school volunteers to provide government-issued photo ID even if they have no unsupervised contact with children or little contact at all. A Crawford High School alumni communication I received noted that volunteer participation at a recognition breakfast would not happen due to the San Diego Unified School District requirements for volunteering. The communication included a copy of the SDUSD policy for school volunteers.
The policy has four types of volunteer levels. Category A is for visitors who enter a school for a one-time event and have no unsupervised exposure or contact with children. Category B covers volunteers with group exposure who have little or no direct unsupervised exposure or contact with children. Category C is for volunteers with classroom exposure who work directly with students and may have unsupervised time with those students but only on school district property with district personnel on-site. Category D is for volunteers with unrestricted exposure such as walk-on coaches, off-site tutors and mentors, and overnight chaperones.
Category A volunteers must be able to present current government-issued photo identification as well as being sponsored or approved by a school site or district employee, signing the volunteer sign-in sheet, and displaying a volunteer identification badge. Category B includes those four requirements along with completing and submitting for approval the school district volunteer application, being checked on the sexual offender data base by designated site personnel, and presenting a tuberculosis clearance card or obtaining a tuberculosis risk assessment form from the school nurse.
There is a minimum age of 18 to vote, but voters are not prohibited from having their children accompany them to the polls. Voters may also be around children albeit not unsupervised. If as the education establishment believes voters should not be required to present government-issued photo identification then why should school volunteers need to do so?
The likely reason San Diego Unified School District students only had a graduation requirement of two years of science between ninth and twelfth grades when I was a junior high school and high school student is that in those years they didn’t trust us not to make our own drugs or explosives if we knew how. I had the mandatory two years of science between ninth and twelfth grades along with one semester during my two years in seventh and eighth grades. We had to get our drugs or firecrackers from Mexico.
We didn’t need Mexican imports in our quest for A000. The San Diego City Schools had an early version of the Internet with an account series for each school, and in some cases students would be given their own account within that series. A000 was the master account. Some computer class or computer club members tried to get the password to A000, although I don’t believe any of them were successful.
Computer hacking has proliferated since the days of A000. If a volunteer provides his or her driver’s license to the school it is possible that some student or other hacker will be able to access that person’s date of birth, driver’s license number, and address. That’s more of a security risk than being around children while being supervised by school district personnel.
I can support photo ID and background checks for Category C and Category D volunteers, but common sense rather than my desire not to waive the Constitution for a good cause is why I oppose requiring photo ID for Category A and Category B volunteers. As is the case with the ban on soda and candy at schools, the requirement only applies during school hours and not at athletic contests or practices so I don’t need to hand over my ID to check with coaches about their athletic needs and any data base research involving yearbooks can be done through the alumni association rather than through the school yearbook advisor so my volunteer skills don’t require me to put my personal data at risk. But if the school district leaders don’t want a requirement of government-issued photo identification for voters why do they want it for their own volunteers who don’t have unsupervised contact?
