There is a new epidemic sweeping across local schools, and it isn’t the flu, a new variant of COVID or any type of sickness. It is the e-hall pass. As a senior at Basalt High School, I have a few thoughts on the matter.
The e-hall pass system was first introduced at Glenwood Spring High School two years ago, and was just implemented at Basalt and Roaring Fork high schools this semester. So far, it is not popular among the student body.
At Basalt, a student has to enter their student ID and submit a request to leave the room for any given reason through a tablet. After the teacher approves it, a timer is set. After the student returns to class, they stop the timer by entering in their student ID number again. Students are permitted three breaks a day.
What’s interesting is the control over who is in the hallway when, so that friends don’t use the time to dawdle or misbehave during class time. The system can deny some students from leaving the room because of behavioral concerns associated with another particular student who may be in the hall at the same time. Plus, the school can take your phone if you disobey the e-hall pass. All of this supposedly promotes a better learning environment, but, so far, it seems to distract from class time and can be a point of contention between students and teachers.
Every time a teacher has to grant permission for someone to leave the classroom, it disrupts class — which seems to happen almost every five minutes!
As seniors, most of us are already 18, so adults. If we are old enough to enlist in the military and register to vote, old enough to drive our friends around the country, go to college and live on our own, we should be able to have access to our phones (even if they have to be parked in the phone pockets where students have to put up their phones during class time).
How would you like it if your breaks were monitored throughout the day by a machine? Alas, that is the new reality for now. It doesn’t seem fair to me.
In fact, most students who I have heard talk about the e-hall pass detest it. There have even been students who have tried to bypass this new system and not use the hall pass, only to have a teacher shut them down.
Schools are supposed to be about fostering a positive learning environment for students, not about tracking where students are and are not supposed to be at that exact minute.
Why was the e-hall pass implemented in the Roaring Fork School District in the first place? I don’t know the entire story, but I suspect it was because a small group of people made the same bad decisions, such as vaping in the bathroom.
We are all being controlled because of the bad decisions of only a few students. Sure, the students who have made those mistakes may be being punished, but now so is every single other student.
Under the Geneva Convention, collective punishment is classified as a war crime. This goes against international law! Well, that got dark quickly … Joking aside, it seems to me that the old fashioned hall passes worked just fine holding things together. They were like the duct tape of the school.