Digital hall passes limit the time students spend outside of class and prevent some behavior problems, administrators say, according to an article in Education Week. This represents a convergence of two hot topics in education—cellphones and lost instructional time.
Digital hall passes aren’t a new phenomenon in schools—some districts have employed them for years to manage hallway traffic.
What’s less common is for digital hall passes—sometimes managed with cellphones—to coexist with cellphone restrictions. In one school district, students may request a hall pass with the push of a button on their school-issued laptops using the district’s online platform. Their teacher receives the request on their device and can either approve or deny the pass.
If approved, the student leaves class and heads to their requested location. The passes are valid for a predetermined amount of time—seven minutes for a bathroom break, two minutes to refill a water bottle, etc.—and students must be back in the classroom when time runs out.
To avoid teacher disruptions, the district worked with the product developer to set up a mode that allows students to request a pass on their computer, then verbally ask their teacher for permission to leave before they can approve the pass themselves on their own laptops, eliminating the need for the teacher to step away from their lesson. A teacher can intervene if a student tries to leave the classroom without a pass, but the district hasn’t had problems with students abusing the system.
Students don’t carry a physical pass when they leave the room. The district’s security staff, teachers, and administrators have access to the dashboard that shows which students have active hall passes and where they’re allowed to go. If a staff member sees a student in the hallway, they can pull up the system on their phone or tablet and confirm the student has permission to be out of class.
Three benefits of digital hall passes:
1) Students have an extra layer of security in an emergency. If there is a lockdown or evacuation and a student is out of the classroom, administrators can check the hall pass system to find where that student was supposed to be, says Nelle Biggs, the principal of Summit Middle School in Frisco, Colo. This eases some parents’ concerns about not being able to contact their children on their cellphones during the school day, says Erin Dillon, the school’s assistant principal.
2) Administrators can limit the number of passes students receive each day and institute a “cooling-off period.” This means students can’t request a new pass until at least an hour has passed since their last request in Summit Middle School. The school can raise or lower students’ daily pass allotment depending on their individual needs, Dillon says.
“It’s a way to help students learn time management, because they have these passes and they choose how they’re going to use them, which is an important skill for them to develop,” Biggs says.
3) Schools have fewer behavioral problems and better attendance
In one district survey, 98 percent of teachers said student attendance in their individual classes was either unchanged, improved or greatly improved since the virtual hall pass initiatives started. School suspensions for “major rule violations,” such as physical altercations or attacks, decreased about 20 percent in the first year of implementation.
At Summit Middle School, there has been a sizable decrease in the time teachers and administrators spend dealing with disruptions during instructional time, both in and out of the classroom, Biggs says.
Virtual hall passes combined with cellphone restrictions have been a positive for the kids’ mental health, positive for running the school and positive for them building social and interpersonal skills, Biggs says.
Education Week
