Many educational authorities believe that students should be forced to wear clear backpacks, as students could potentially hide various non-educational items in opaque, cloth bags. 

“The primary objective… is to enhance safety and security… Clear bags provide transparency and enable security personnel to easily inspect their contents,” substitute Deepa Makkar said.

While promoted for protection, many students don’t support the implementation of clear backpacks. Freshman Siva Priya Kannan explains how, in the long run, it can pose detrimental effects to the environment.

“Plastic is more harmful to the earth than cloth…we’re using up more fossil fuels,” Kannan said. “Using cloth backpacks will be much more sustainable.”

While Kannan is looking at the big picture impact of clear backpacks, many students also note the problems it portrays on a personal level. 

“They are taking away our personal freedom if they do this,” Freshman Amiesha Umbarkar said.

Finally, both staff and students seem to believe that enforcing clear backpacks still won’t have a paramount impact on the issue it was made to solve: preventing kids from sneaking in dangerous items to school.

“If we have to wear clear backpacks, kids will just find another way to sneak in drugs or weapons or whatever harmful stuff they want to bring,” Kannan said. 

Though students and staff are divided on the implementation of clear backpacks, both believe that safety is still the number one priority.

“Even though I don’t agree with having clear backpacks, students hiding bad stuff is a major issue that needs to be solved,” Umbarkar said. “Together we can solve this problem, with or without clear backpacks.”

The case of students actually being weapons at school is very, very rare. We use specific backpacks for specific students, but they’ll find ways to hide them anyway.