Remember the good old days, when you had to use the bathroom, all you had to do was sign your name on a sheet and grab a green hall pass? Now, whenever one wishes to use the restroom, students must go through a computer to gain a hall pass.

The new 5-Star hall pass policy is being piloted this year and requires students to virtually receive a hall pass before leaving the classroom. To accommodate various time frames for activities like Media, there are different types of hall passes with distinct times. Once a student enters their ID into the chromebook kiosk, a green hall pass is displayed to the student’s linked 5-Star app on their phone. Then the students know how much time is left for them to return to class. 

“Our goal is to have the restrooms be a clean and safe place for students to use,” Assistant Principal John Pichon said.

Administrators intend to create a student-centric educational environment by being efficient with learning time.

“We need (students) in class because that’s how (they) learn, that’s how (they)’re going to receive information,” Pichon said.

5-Star also allows for teachers to personalize hall passes to individual needs and to their classroom. For instance, they can determine if students must sign back into 5-Star after they have returned to the classroom. 

With the timer and register of an online hall pass, teachers can check what time students left class. This also functions as a deterrent to kids who aim to skip class.

Alongside vaping, “the biggest (issue) would be when the restrooms would be vandalized,” Pichon said. 

According to Pichon, bathrooms are only locked when they are damaged or out of order.

“If (the students) are gone for a long time, the app will know and then (the staff) can deal with it,” AP Statistics and Data Science teacher Bruce Honberger said. 

Previously, only 15 students campus-wide were allowed out of class at a time; however, the restriction created challenges. When confronted with these complications, teachers could fall back on their old system with physical hall passes.

“I really like this tool and I think it will be very helpful for data collection once the entire staff moves over to it,” CP English 12 and Leadership teacher Meghan Haflich said. “For now, it is easy for me, and my students like the ease of it, too!”

Angela Mahr, the head custodian, mentioned that while the timer could be a solution to vandalism, a more rigorous approach could be advantageous in preventing students from lingering, vandalizing, and vaping.

Campus monitors could help prevent the student from dawdling “if they are alerted that a student is (exiting the classroom),” Mahr said. 

This could decrease the amount of time students spend in bathrooms, thus decreasing their time frame to deface stalls if campus monitors are aware of the time students exit a classroom.

Haflich and Honberger said the only drawback they experience is the sign in process, which requires a two-step verification every morning. Because this is a test run, the administrators welcome any and all feedback concerning new 5-star policies.

“We always like to seek input from our teachers and do what works best for the students, teachers, and the school,” Pichon said.