Hall passes have become less popular in many schools and are being replaced with sign out sheets. A sign out sheet is a piece of paper where you would write you name, where you are going, and the time you left and came back so that the teachers can see how often, long and when you went to the bathroom.
Though hall passes are more traditional I am personally think that hall passes are not very beneficial.
While I don’t favor hall passes. there are some positives to them. Many teachers have a hard time deciphering a student who is simply just going to the bathroom from one who is skipping class: with hall passes teachers would know that the student is going to the bathroom. This can also prevent kids from wandering around school and to meet up with friends.
In an article about hall passes, Tom Quatman, a hall monitor, has an easier time figuring out when kids are skipping: “[The hope is that] students are telling their teachers what they need to be telling them. If they go to the bathroom and end up at the snack machine, they’re not following what they’re supposed to and they’re not telling their teacher the truth,” Quatman said. “So that’s how we find out students are wandering in the halls where they shouldn’t be.”
With hall passes student wandering can be limited. Teachers also benefit from hall passes because it is an easy way to make sure only one person is out of the room at a time. This is helpful because in a class of either twenty or twenty-five people it can be difficult to monitor everyone’s whereabouts.
Though there are benefits, hall passes also have a significant amount of drawbacks. Hall passes are a huge distraction and have many challenges. For starters many students steal or misplace the hall pass. This can be quite annoying for teachers especially since they are not given replacement ones.
In an article, Ben Shoykhet touched on how hall passes being lost effect teachers: “The aforementioned issue is worsened by the disappearance of passes. Throughout the year, classrooms have lost passes, due to students forgetting to return them, or dropping them. Since the teachers are not supplied with replacement passes, they either have to supply their own or accept the loss. It should not be the responsibility of the teachers to make passes of their own, and it also should not negatively impact the students, reducing the number of those allowed out at a time to just one.”
Passes going missing is only one of the struggles schools face with hall passes. Another set back is that passes can be disruptive to learning. This is because if more than one student needs to leave the teacher has to stop teaching and write a pass or deny the kids ability to leave: “The detrimental effects of the pass policy far outweigh the beneficial ones. On the (now more uncommon) occasion that students do take a pass unnoticed, there is only one pass available to the other students of that class who may need it to get water or use the restroom. This restriction disrupts learning, as those students cannot focus if they are instead waiting, hoping the pass comes back soon, so they may take care of their basic human needs.”
Kids should not be denied the basic right of being able to go to the bathroom just because a student is already out of the room. Obviously if this is a reoccurring problem of multiple students leaving then there should be limitations set, but until then I don’t think it is necessary.
While preventing kids from randomly leaving class is necessary, I feel that the cons of having hall passes out weighs the pros. Disrupting kids learning all because of a hall pass is unnecessary. Also there are other ways to keep track of kids such as sign out sheets and hall monitors.
