The new digital Focus bathroom passes have significantly improved from the previous physical bathroom passes, yet several difficulties come along with them. The main concern, though, is how students can’t end the passes without relying on a teacher.
The digital bathroom passes are mostly easy and efficient for teachers to use. A student can make a pass and then a five minute time starts. The passes appear on the teachers’ screens as well as the hall monitors ‘iPads so they can see where the students are and how long they’ve been in the bathroom.
The hall monitors have an app on their iPads called Hall Pass, where they can see the active hall passes made for all the students who are out. They are green when they are in the time range, but when they expire, the pass turns red on their screen, signaling to them that a student could be doing something aside from just using the bathroom. They can also stop the hall passes if a teacher forgets to stop them for a student.
“It affects the students, but not us,” said hall monitor Patty Colyer.
Teachers commonly forget to end hall passes, resulting in some students’ stress. Students can not end the bathroom passes on their own, having to rely on the teachers to turn them off, although most teachers will not put a halt to their lessons or learning processes to end the bathroom pass right away.
“The main thing that it affects is my ability to keep just walking around and helping kids,” math teacher Lauren Jacks said. One of Jacks’ concerns was about students’ learning and how it can prevent her from helping students, especially when students need to use the bathroom back-to-back.
Students are concerned that they are unable to end the passes themselves. Sometimes teachers forget to end them because they are are the middle of teaching.
“Why aren’t we able to do it? It’s us going to the bathroom, not the teachers. We should be able to control it ourselves,” Yessenia Murillo-Avalos (10) said.
According to school administration, they are currently trying to get the Central Office to let students end bathroom passes so that ending the bathroom passes becomes less of a hassle for both students and teachers alike.
