Among the many policy changes this fall, Tualatin High School students may have noticed the brightly coloured signs outside of bathrooms and the disappearance of the previous e-hall pass system.
For incoming freshmen, the e-hall pass system involved students making passes on their Chromebooks. This program either let teachers accept/deny pass requests or allowed students to create their own passes. The e-hall pass website also had a system that tracked how long students were gone, and this information could be used to see if a student was spending an especially long amount of time out of any given class or missing big parts of the school day entirely.
Some students thought the e-hall pass system wasn’t the best, while others preferred it. “Logging in and out of a Chromebook every time was annoying,” senior Serzi Slider said.
Some students prefer the more traditional method of writing hall passes upon request, rather than putting the request into a computer.
“If we didn’t have a charged Chromebook or iPad, we couldn’t go to the bathroom, and personally, I just like paper better since it’s kind of always there. Someone will always have a pencil or pen. It’s very simple. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” freshman Akemi Baugh said.
Some students also mentioned how the bathrooms and hallways were more crowded when e-hall pass was being used, and that students often gathered and skipped class there.
The new pass system for students is hall zoning. This involves students having a brightly-colored physical pass, as opposed to digitally checking out. Each color of pass is specific to a zone of the building based on where a student’s current class is. The district says that this is to prevent students from wandering the school and to prevent crowding in the hallways or library during class.
The penalty for being caught in the wrong zone is being walked back to your class, but if you’re a repeat offender, you may lose the ability to use hall passes entirely.
“It’s alright, better than e-hall pass. I understand it’s for the sake of students not wandering off to a completely different area of the building,” said sophomore Zachary Lai.
But not all students agree that the change is a good one.
“I’d rather switch back to e-hall passes with more freedom, even if it costs more for the district,” senior Kaare Barkhoefer said.
It seems that the hall zoning system is a bit controversial, as it fixes some problems while creating others. Students report that some zones, like the yellow zone, lack a water fountain, while others lack gender neutral bathrooms, which poses a problem for students who may not feel comfortable using gendered restrooms.
