Hall passes are a waste of time and paper. We should either be trusting the students of Jackson-Reed and changing the norm to no passes, or find a more eco-friendly system to keep using passes. There has to be a better way to show what students are doing in the hallways than using hall passes.

The green paper hall passes that the Jackson-Reed administration makes you use to go to the bathroom, get water, or go anywhere out of class are fairly new to Jackson-Reed. At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, little green paper hall passes made their appearance. While they started strong in the beginning of the year, usage dipped as teachers ran out or gave up on them altogether. 

With this years’ passes already running out, teachers have had to create their own passes, using index cards, sticky notes or basically anything that can be  written on. However, teachers themselves don’t even find these passes necessary, but instead an annoying inconvenience whenever a student needs to leave class. Some students will leave the class without a pass just because either the teacher is busy, or there aren’t any more hall passes left. So, they may just leave class, knowing that they don’t need a pass. Teachers and monitors who are in the hallway during class don’t even check the passes when students are milling around. All of the paper going into these passes is a waste and most just end up going in the trash instead of recycling bins. All this wasted paper could have a much more ecofriendly purpose being used for almost anything else in our school. 

When you walk into the bathroom, you can see hall passes that have been left on the sinks, bathroom stalls, floor, etc. The bathrooms at this school are already a mess, and the piles of passes aren’t helping. If the passes were more important, students wouldn’t leave them behind. Students and teachers alike understand that no one is getting asked by a staff member in the halls if you have a pass or not. So why are we continuing to use them if they are doing more bad than good? 

There are other ways of knowing who has an excuse to leave the classroom. For example, a sheet of paper with many spaces for hall passes that could be reused for multiple trips. Teachers would still have a paper signature from a teacher to prove that the student can be in the hallway, but it also would save so much paper. Another system is teachers each having one or two laminated, pre-signed passes that students can reuse, which a few teachers have already implemented. This would save paper and since the teachers would only have a few, the students have a reason to bring the passes back to class. Finally, we could genuinely get rid of the entire pass system, as it seems to not be functioning the way it was originally intended, but instead has caused all these inconveniences.