Online schooling highlights student tech issues

OPINION MAY 6-7, 2021 Opinions about e-hallpass remain divided, students more against than staff members

By: Scott Letourneau E-hallpass was adopted by the Olathe School District in an effort to minimize the risk of COVID-19 exposure. The software can track the amount of time a person is gone before arriving at their destination or coming back to the classroom, making it easier to tell when a student is messing around or not where they are supposed to be when they leave the classroom. This also allows school administration to perform contact tracing at locations where a student has been if they test positive for COVID-19 so the staff can evaluate the people who may have been exposed to that student and who may be at risk. However, despite the precautions taken and thought that went into this system, many students have shown their distaste for the new system, and it is very unpopular among members of the student body. “I can understand why we transitioned to e-hallpass in order to help track exposures in the school,” senior Danielle Ferguson-Ticao said. “But the timing feature as soon as it’s approved until it’s ended seems like a bit much.” Many students dislike e-hallpass for the inconvenience it causes and the inconvenience it is to set up, as their request may be automatically denied due to a location being full or laptop WiFi being out. “I think so many students dislike e-hallpass because sometimes the bathrooms are full and they have to wait,” freshman Alex Howell said. “Also I think that it’s just tedious sometimes to get your laptop out turn it on, log in and such just to go to the bathroom.” There has also been the apparent issue of students filling out a pass to go to a specific bathroom only to go to the closest one - even if the closest bathroom is the opposite gender. “Sometimes I’ll go to the other one,” senior Lauren Taylor said. “That usually works if the girls’ bathroom is full.” However, despite the inconveniences and bathroom issues e-hallpass presents, it may still be a better alternative compared to the blue planners and advisory sheets used for the previous years. “I do remember when we used planners and advisory sheets,” Ferguson-Ticao said. “So in that sense it’s nice we’ve gone virtual.” The planners were small blue handbooks that acted as the school’s hall pass system. They were easy to get out and have a teacher sign right away without all the hassle presented by e-hallpass, such as long loading times, updates, and connection issues. “I think the planers just in general were more convenient,” senior Sam McCauley said. “With the planners, it was easy to be able to get a

The typical layout of a student’s e-hallpass after logging in. The Olathe School District switched to exclusively using the e-hallpass system in Sept. 2020 in effort to reduce the amount of contact with students’ planners because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Olathe West was already using the system, but other schools were forced to adapt to the new website, that teachers can send students passes to go to their classrooms, or vice versa. It has been met with mixed reception from the student body and staff.

The first page of the old, physical planners that students would take with them when traveling during class (right) and a screenshot of e-hallpass in action with an active pass. Some students preferred the old planners, as they could be given to other students to borrow if needed. e-hallpass is not transferrable between students, and also times students so that administration can monitor how long students are away from class. Administration can also see how many students are in one place at a time.

pass to go to the bathroom or something.” However, there was consistenty a problem with students losing their planners or leaving them at home, which led to students borrowing planners from other people so they could use the restroom or go see a teacher. “Me personally, I don’t think I’ve ever had to borrow a planner because I always kept mine in my backpack and never took it out unless I needed it,” McCauley said. “Even if you left it at home, per se, most of the time someone else in the class always had it.” While most students returned the planners to the people they borrowed them from, there were a few instances where people forgot to give the planner back after they borrowing it and inadvertently walked away with another student’s planner. “A lot of people lost their blue booklet and would have to end up borrowing somebody else’s while they were out,” Ferguson-Ticao said. “And then if they forgot to give it back to the person they borrowed it from it became a mess.” Since the laptops are much harder to leave at home and cannot really be stolen, e-hallpass is an excellent way to reduce the chance of students getting their hall passes stolen. The only thing to stop a student from getting on is if they forgot to charge their laptop the night before and had it die. In that case, however, they could easily log in using someone else’s laptop. “Of course, e-hallpass, you can’t really forget it,” McCauley said. “The computers are not really a daily schedule sort of thing.” Advisory sheets also seemed very nice in theory, even allowing those with high enough grades to obtain a gold advisory sheet that allowed them to go to the commons during Advisory, which many students did. This would not have continued this year however, as the school is limiting people per table to one. “I do miss being able to sit in the commons and hang out with friends or study together peacefully and I hope that once more people get vaccinated and social distancing isn’t necessary that that will start back up,” Ferguson-Ticao said. “I won’t be there for it but I think the future classes will really benefit from that time.” However, the advisory sheets would also keep certain students from leaving the classroom if their grades were too low, a restriction that no longer applies with the installation of e-hallpass. “Say if you were failing English, and you wanted to work on it in your English teacher’s class,” McCauley said. “It just makes more sense to go to your English teacher’s class and work on it than sit in an Advisory room with a teacher that has nothing to do with English, and for them to keep you there because your grade in English is low, that just doesn’t make any sense to me.” Even though e-hallpass takes longer to set up, ehallpass may prove to be the more cautious, equal, fair, and safe system for creating passes in future school years. “I think e-hallpass is here to stay,” Student Naturalist teacher Joan Radakovich said. “There was never a way for the office to track where a student really is until e-hallpass. THE EYRIE