At the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, DGS administration implemented a new hall pass policy. In order to move from a class to another location in the building, students have to fill out a green pass and get it signed by their teacher.
Each pack of passes contains 50 slips of paper and, since the beginning of this school year, 335 packs of passes have been used. That is 16,750 slips of paper that have been used as of Sept. 21. Teachers are given packs of the passes whenever they run out.
Each pack of 50 passes costs $1.12, meaning in total DGS has spent $375.20 on these passes from Aug. 18 to Sept. 21.
DGS has always had some form of hall pass to leave class. Last year there was a lanyard that each classroom shared. Some teachers even used random objects found in their class to allow students to use the restroom. Associate Principal for Operations and Technology Omar Davis shared why administration decided to use this method of hall passes this year.
“One of the things that the community and parents expect is that we account for all of our students as they are here, as well as making sure that they can– in a timely fashion and as scheduled– travel from one place to the next. The green passes are intended to provide a time stamp of any particular student moving from a classroom to the restroom and then back to class,” Davis said.
English teacher Zachary Kuhn explained why he believes administrators have implemented this policy.
“The goal is to say there’s a uniform pass policy. Anyone who leaves the class needs to have that pass, and that way security can ask anyone for a pass at any time and no one gets offended,” Kuhn said.
Now, any time a student needs to use the bathroom, their teacher must fill out a detailed pass. The pass includes the student and teacher’s name, the time they left, where they are coming from, going to and the date. Junior Alexi Newsome shared her feelings on the class time used to fill out these passes.
“I feel like it takes our teachers time to write it. I feel like when we had the standard passes for each room, teachers were more likely to just let us go and come back. Now it’s like ‘Can you wait until I have time?’ which can be hard if you really have to go to the bathroom and they don’t feel like writing them anymore,” Newsome said.
The leniency of using the restroom has changed since these passes were instituted, so many students see them as a negative. However, junior Chrissa Demos believes they have a positive side.
“I like the fact that they are sanitary, and you don’t have to have one pass that everyone has been touching through the whole day,” Demos said.
Since the passes are paper, they can be disposed of after they are used, but staff is going through them quickly. DGS administration is considering switching to digital hall passes instead of paper. The overall goal is to keep track of students in the building, which the administration believes they are doing currently through the new policy.
