Friday night football games are some of the most fun times of the school year. Dressing up for the theme, cheering for your team, watching the marching band, and most importantly, bringing community and friends together are what make it special.

Recently, several schools have put in place new policies restricting students from other schools from accessing the home stands. These policies have gotten so extreme that at Buffalo Grove High School, students from schools that aren’t competing are not allowed in either the home stands or the visitor stands. These policies ruin the main thing that makes football games fun, which is bringing people together. Instead, they separate friend groups and promote division. This is especially frustrating because many middle schools feed into different D214 high schools. For example, London Middle School feeds into both BGHS and WHS, which means friendships formed in middle school are now being split apart by these policies.

The reason I am making this petition is that these policies have personally affected me and my friends. I remember going to the Buffalo Grove vs Hoffman Estates football game last week. I was going with my friends from Wheeling, and we were planning to meet friends from Buffalo Grove. As we were waiting in line to pay for tickets to enter the home stands, we were told we could not enter despite the fact that our friends were visibly standing near the gate, waiting for us. We then tried to go to the visitor stands, but a police officer told us that since we were not from the school Buffalo Grove was competing against, we were not allowed to even enter the visitor stands. The officer also spoke to us in an unnecessarily rude way when telling us about this policy.

The next week, we went to Wheeling High School to watch the game against Hoffman Estates. I invited a friend from Hersey. As I was visibly waiting for him at the gate, the dean, who was checking everyone in, told him he could not enter the home stands since he did not attend Wheeling. As a result of these policies, I was separated from the friends I had known for many years during the most exciting time of the school year.

I, along with the people who signed this petition, urge District 214 to adopt a policy allowing all students to enter the home student section at any District 214 high school if they are accompanied by a student from the hosting school. The current policies do not make games safer. They only separate friends and weaken our community. Let’s fix this by adopting a policy that actually brings students together.