Gone are the days of teachers writing bathroom passes, replaced now with online forms for students to fill out.
Up until the beginning of last year, students were given paper hall passes filled out by the teachers before leaving the classroom. At the start of this school year, however, the school administration switched to online bathroom passes.
“We are trying to limit the amount of people abusing the hall pass system,” academy principal Tyler Adkins said. “We just wanted to increase the time of students being in the classroom. We could visually see how many kids were in the halls, but we didn’t know how many.”
When principals were looking for a new system, they looked for something that would show them how many times a student was using the pass and what periods the students were leaving the classroom. They also wanted a system that would waste less paper.
The school administration believes the new bathroom system is a good idea, and so do the teachers. English teacher Susan Barry explained about how she feels about the bathroom passes.
“I think it is a good idea. I think it’s controlling some traffic in the hallways. As long as everybody is kind of on board with it, they’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” Barry said.
Another pro of this system is that it may stop students from skipping class for long periods at a time.
“That might deter them from just easily grabbing a pass and walking out of the classroom, so some people know it’s like I don’t want to do that, then they don’t need to use it,” Adkins said.
There are pros and cons to the new online bathroom pass system. One pro is that it prevents kids from avoiding class time. Some people believe that it helps stop people from doing illegal things in the bathroom as well.
“We don’t want people meeting up and doing illegal things in the bathroom, and so we felt like it was a little bit too easy for students to get out into the halls,” Adkins said.
This is just one reason that individuals believe that the new online system is better than the old physical system. Many people also believe that the new version is more environmentally friendly.
“Instead of just writing passes and then ripping them up and throwing them away, we have them laminated and we write on them with dry erase markers so they can go back and forth,” Adkins said.
One criticism of this new system is that it can be quite slow. Junior Isabel Juarez dislikes the new system.
“I’m not a huge fan just because it takes a long time to get them filled out and your teacher to see them,” Juarez said.
While teachers feel like this new system is necessary and effective, Juarez isn’t the only student who thinks otherwise senior Jaden Starks feels the same way.
“I feel like I shouldn’t have to sign an online document saying where I am, where I’m going at all times,” Starks said.
