An coordinator’s thoughts on South’s new digital hall pass system.

Starting at the end of October, South fully adopted an online hall pass system in hopes of increasing safety and efficiency when students leave the classroom.

Instead of using paper passes, lanyards, or sign-out sheets, students can access SmartPass on their computer to create the type of pass they want in order to leave a classroom. Students are then allotted a certain amount of time for the pass they select (eight minutes for a bathroom pass, for example) and assigned a color-coded lanyard in order for staff to easily see which part of the school a student came from.

While this system is new for most students and staff at South, this online system was piloted last year with a small number of classes. One of the reasons it’s being implemented school-wide is because a single system provides consistency and school-wide organization.

“One of the things that I had noticed in my first year is that not every teacher gives a hall pass,” Steven Tygart, South’s Student Success Coordinator, said. “When I see people in the hall, I might ask them for a pass. Sometimes they have it and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes when they have it, it might not even be a new pass.”

Many are hoping that the online passes will provide a more organized and unified system and be a smooth transition for students and staff. One of the main purposes of the hall pass is to easily identify where students should be based off of the color-coded lanyards students are asked to wear when they leave the classroom.

The online system also provides a digital footprint and gives staff the ability to see how many times students leave their classes.

“This is a way where we can identify students who tend to spend a lot of time outside a class and might be meeting up with other people in other classes,” Tygart said. “We might see online that their friend is out of the classroom and we can have the other student wait until their friend’s pass is done before we issue them a pass.”

Another purpose of the pass system is to bring awareness to students as to how long they’ve been outside of the classroom.

“People often don’t realize how long they are outside of the classroom. And so this new pass policy has a timer associated with it, so people are aware of how much time they may or may not be outside of class,” Tygart commented.

This new system wasn’t a district-wide decision. So far, it has been instituted solely at South and each school in the district is continuing to make their own policies.

“Last year I worked at North Eugene High School and Churchill High School and they have different pass policies there and different cell phone policies. So every school has their own autonomy to kind of make the decisions that they want to in regards to these things,” Tygart explained. “I know that they have their own systems there and people are still very liberal with how much time they might be spending in the halls, so I think this is a situation that happens at other schools too.”

With this pass system being so new, there are some obstacles. For example, this system is not the easiest for all classes, like physical education. Students are also forgetting to close their passes once they return to class.

“There are some passes that are 45 minutes long and so sometimes we close them. This is a bit problematic because there are only a certain number of passes that are allowed at any given time, so when people don’t close their pass, new ones can’t be created by students, [and] teachers will have to override and do it,” Tygart commented.

With only a few weeks of this new system, there are still some complications to work out, but staff are working to be flexible and understanding of this shift.

“We are still trying to sort it out and make sure people are where they are supposed to be,” Tygart stated. “Ultimately, we want people to be in class so that they can learn and can get credits to graduate in four years.”

Stay tuned for student perspectives on the new hall pass system in the upcoming issues!

Article by Jada Jones