North Penn High School recently implemented a new spectator policy for football games stating: “All middle school and high school students must show ID to purchase a ticket to enter the game. Students in middle school or younger must be accompanied by a parent or guardian with a ticket in order to enter Crawford Stadium.”  The issue with this policy is that currently in the district 9th grade classes are in the middle schools. Despite consistently being told by teachers and administrators that 9th are high schoolers and will be treated as such, 9th graders are not allowed to attend football games with out a parent chaperone. 

9th graders are high school freshman.  We play sports on the high school teams and many of us also take some classes at the high school.  I strongly believe that since we are playing high school sports and are high school freshman taking classes that will appear on our college transcripts that we should be afforded the same rights and privileges as all our high school peers.  My hope is to gather enough signatures to show the school administration that the current policy is unjust and needs to be changed.  Let 9th graders attend games just as the upperclassman do.

By no means should bad behavior by any spectators be tolerated but it is not fair to punish an entire grade out of fear that some may display poor conduct.  Punish those who don’t follow the rules and require those who aren’t considered high schoolers to attend with parents, but please don’t punish the Freshman.  Those of us playing on JV teams know how great it is to have home crowd support during our games and we want to provide that same energy for our Football team.  

Sign my petition and stop the hypocrisy.  Tell the administrators who tell us we are high school freshman to treat us as such!