Recently for the 2023-2024 school year Hamburg Area High School has added and tweaked several policies. One policy in particular that has thrown teachers and students into a learning curve is the new hallpass system. E-hallpass, is a digital pass system that involves check-ins, check-outs, and timers. This system can be operated on both the student and teacher computers for easy access at any time. It seems that summer break is gone and so is the physical hall pass.
A lot of teachers at HAHS have been teaching in the building for many years, some over a decade, and all of them have been using physical passes up until this year. Mrs. McCarthy, who has been teaching at HAHS for 28 years, generally thinks E-hallpass is an adequate system that will fix some of the problems like students roaming the halls, with its timer. Meanwhile, Mrs. Zglinicki, a study hall proctor, finds E-hallpass to be extremely time consuming with a rough learning curve. Though Mrs. Zglinicki does acknowledge the pros of the system’s timer just like Mrs. McCarthy.
A student Google survey was sent out, and 137 high schoolers responded. Fifty-eight percent of these students do not like E-hallpass at all. While eight percent prefer it to the physical hallpass. Some student complaints were how long it took to fill out the form, the inconvenience of stopping a teacher during class, glitches within the E-hallpass website, and the time which it takes compared to physical passes. This was not it for the student complaints with the system however. The majority of students at HAHS seem to have a distaste for E-hallpass due to its inconvenient nature with the laptops. On the flipside, teachers seem to be enjoying it for the capabilities it displays in the school environment.
