Hey! You! Where's your hall pass?

Phoebe Smolin, a student at Hamilton High School, writes:

The evolution of the hall pass has been an innovative one; over the years, I’ve had to carry clipboards, toilet seats, stethoscopes, chairs, broken desk parts, paintbrushes, steering wheels, stuffed animals, paper, and water bottles just to get from class to the bathroom. 

The hall pass phenomenon reached an odd level today at Hamilton High School: Along with carrying a clipboard, students must wear a bright yellow vest with a room number written on it to prove that they have been given permission to leave the classroom.

(Student Camila Lacques sports Hamilton's new hall pass.)

At the beginning of the day, this rule was seen as something of a cruel joke, and many students carried the vest. As the day progressed, I heard from my peers that people were being harshly yelled at for not properly wearing the vest. By sixth period, my school looked like a walking box of highlighters.

The rule was created so students would have no way of forging a hall pass. Although the reason is valid, the rule remains one of the most hilarious ones I've seen and it only makes me wonder: What's next for the hall pass? Clown shoes?

Photo by Phoebe Smolin

Comments

[Robert in L.A.]

I first saw this approach used in 2005 at Monroe High while doing on-site observations as part of a teacher credentialling path. I was amazed at how simple it was and I had been teaching high school in LAUSD 2 years already. Truly, the right hand does not know what the left is doing in LAUSD. Monroe ia a huge campus in the valley and this visual form of determing whether a student is legitimately out of the classroom saved a lot of time and energy.

Meanwhile, at my school, the usual paper forms and notes were used, making a personal contact with each of-of-class student necessary to see if they had a pass, if it was old or forged and lots of work was needed to do this. This allowed many students to wander about among the others who were not able to be checked because there were too many to get to everyone.

I tried to tell our adminstrators about this but it was not their priority apparently, wasting instead many man-hours of staffing having to go one-on-one. I told my class about this hall pass device and many said they would not wear a vest, to which i replied, good, then we can have less people leaving the class.

I left that school soon after, returning to my regular field, and kept in touch with people there. I found that they have begun to use that vest system. It's obvously simpler for enforcement, with one person able to use the radio from varioius vantage points to direct security to non-vested persons, identifying ditchers and visitors who have not checked in. This helps solve the problem of so many out of class students losing instructional minutes and also being able to minimize the labor time to do the previously frustrating and tedious task that the one to one job required.

The LAUSD has various examples like this where cases of re-inventing the wheel continue too frequently and shared tips never fully become shared, as well as stubborn administrators who refuse to try thing based on ego issues.

And they want smaller "learning academies" when it's the lack of smaller administrative systems that really impede progress at assorted levels. This need for more responsiveness to situations seems to be better met by charter schools, helping overal performance.