Crossfire: Is e-hallpass a positive addition to McLean?

E-hallpass ensures positive learning environment

isabella DiPatri Managing Editor

Last school year, hallways and bathrooms remained crowded during class periods. All throughout the day, stalls were filled with students hanging out with their friends rather than attending class. Little emphasis was placed on how important it is to stay in class and remain focused throughout the school day.

In response to this behavior, McLean implemented the e-hallpass system to prioritize focusing on learning and classwork for students.

“We are able to ensure that students are going where they are supposed to be going and returning back to class as quickly as possible,” Principal Ellen Reilly said. “We are keeping people in class longer and making sure that they are learning the material that they should be learning.”

E-hallpasses have significantly reduced hallway and bathroom traffic during class periods. Students are able to stay concentrated during times of instruction, as the system works effectively to discourage students who intend to skip valuable class time.

“People have to be held responsible for where they are going,” Reilly said. “E-hallpass is setting a tone for the school—that we’re here for academics, and it’s time to get back down to business.”

Without an organized system, McLean’s issues regarding overcrowding make it extremely difficult for faculty to monitor who is in the hallway. The e-hallpass system gives teachers and administrators direct access to when students clock in and out of classrooms to ensure they are where they are supposed to be.

“It’s nice for [Student Services] to know that students’ teachers know that students are coming down here,” counselor Greg Olcott said. “[We send] them back with everything time stamped, so we know they’re not abusing the pass.”

This feature also helps teachers track down students during drills or emergencies. It is crucial for administration to monitor students in order to create a safe learning environment.

“[E-hallpass] is helping students stay in class, which everybody should be doing,” Reilly said. “[If there is a significant problem] with e-hallpass, [students] can come down and let us know what about it is annoying, so we can help solve it.”

Despite the original concern that e-hallpassses would distract from lectures and presentations, students have become more self-aware in their timing to use the bathrooms. Asking a teacher to use the bathroom without the e-hallpass creates just as much of a distraction. During the first few weeks back, students have waited until there is a period of independent work to send their teacher a request to leave the classroom, and many teachers now have the system set to auto-approve bathroom passes. The process is smooth, and there have been minimal instances where e-hallpasses are actually a distraction from a lecture or other learning activity.

“[E-hallpasses] are so much faster than writing passes,” Olcott said. “With any new process there are going to be some growing pains, but e-hallpass has grown on me, so I am definitely a believer [in them].”

There are still many opportunities at McLean to meet up with friends and enjoy the social aspect of school. However, e-hallpasses are working to enforce a positive system of safety, communication and trust between faculty and students.

was introducing e-hallpass the right move for mclean?

E-hallpass doesn’t fix student disengagement

Saehee perez editor-in-chief

One of the only guarantees in high school is that students will find a way around rules and regulations they don’t agree with. Whether it be by making their destination a random water fountain or a teacher known to not consistently check e-hallpass, students can still get around e-hallpass restrictions at McLean.

Students who were of concern to administrators—those vaping in bathrooms, wandering the hallways, missing half of a class period— can and will still do the same things as before. While the time period they can be gone without suspicion may be shortened to 20 minutes at a time, that length of time is drastically lengthened if a student simply does not fill out an e-hallpass.

Before the implementation of e-hallpass, most students already stayed inside their classrooms without wandering the halls or camping out in bathrooms. The school adopting a system that records students’ locations outside of the classroom fails to recognize or address the underlying issue of student participation in class. If a student is not present in class, they deserve to be offered support in school, not to have where they are tracked every minute during the school day.

Not only is it odd to time how long a student is in the bathroom, it raises privacy concerns. E-hallpass does not meet the recommendations for privacy and security practices from Common Sense, an organization that reviews the privacy policies of apps.

Additionally, it’s better for students to learn from the consequences of their actions than to be forced to comply with rules that they’ll just find a way around. Accountability is a crucial skill that should be developed before graduating high school, and the students who are skipping class are not learning self-discipline by being forced to record their location outside of the classroom. Moreover, minor issues with e-hallpass add up to be disruptive. Refreshing the page every 30 seconds to request a spot in the blue hallway bathroom once it’s below maximum capacity distracts a student from class. Needing to ask for approval on e-hallpass requests in the middle of a lesson distracts the entire class. Sometimes, students who do not want to interrupt class by awkwardly filling out an e-hallpass wait until the passing period to use the bathroom. By then, the bathroom is already filled with people who also waited, making everyone in line risk being late to their next class. Adding a limit to the bathroom makes McLean’s overcrowding problem more painful when we can see that the bathroom is at “maximum capacity” less than 10 minutes into a class period. In the time it takes someone to begin an e-hallpass, walk to the bathroom, use it and walk back to their classroom, two students could have used the bathroom. When there are also students who request to go to the bathroom and don’t actually use it, other students who actually need to go are prevented from doing so. In conjunction with the new phone policy, the e-hallpass system bars students from using the restroom during a test, because they can’t have a phone or laptop out. This creates a negative testing environment and causes stress to students who must ask the teacher to create a pass for them. While conducting interviews for this article, teachers who had expressed dislike for the e-hallpass system denied interview requests. The aggressive implementation of e-hallpass has made it so that neither student nor teacher concerns are heard. Though the intent is there, e-hallpass has proven to be an ineffective and inconvenient alternative to paper passes and should be reconsidered.