Like hundreds of other schools in the United States, vaping and drug use in the bathrooms is a long-standing issue. Students leave class to vape, buy or sell drugs, drink alcohol, or wander around with their friends. These issues prevent students from learning and pull them away from class time.
At the start of this school year, the administration in the office implemented a new hall pass system using the app, Minga. Minga has a hall pass system as well as a virtual ID system and a home page with events listed. With this pass system, students can create a TA pass, a health office pass, a bathroom pass, or a library pass.
However, these hall passes are timed. The most commonly used pass is the bathroom pass, which gives students a five-minute limit to be out of class. Like all new things, this time limit has sparked controversy among students. Timing has become a larger problem among students.
“I think the timed hall passes could end up being bad because right before PAWS and the end of the day, some of the bathrooms are closed, so you have to go to the farther ones,” Pragun Chouhan said. “You end up taking more than five minutes to use the restroom, which doesn’t work out.”
This is a common opinion. Out of 268 voters on a poll on @detailsyearbook on Instagram, 80 percent dislike the new hall pass system.
“I don’t like it because I need more time,” Raychel Griffin said. “Five minutes isn’t enough. If I’m down by the portables, I have to walk and I run out of time.”
Another concern staffers and students have is connectivity issues. What happens if the wifi goes out or Chromebooks are slow, causing Minga not to work? Will students be prohibited from using the restroom or going to the nurse?
“It’s set up as a system where the kids can use their Chromebook or their cell phones, because if it was cell phones only with the cell phone policy we have, we wouldn’t have done it,” Assistant Principal Penelope Shelton said.
The excessive number of students meeting in the bathroom and wandering around the halls during class time was one reason that administration turned to timed passes. As with many schools, vaping in the school restrooms was prevalent. E-cigarettes, like vapes, are the most common use of tobacco among youth (CDC.gov).
“The problem was last year a lot of students congregated in the bathrooms to vape, and you can tell they were all planning it and coordinating their time to use the bathroom and hang out,” Shelton said.
The new system allows the administration to control the amount of people leaving class at certain times, which students are out of class at the same time and the number of times someone can leave classes each day.
As students have started to use the Minga system to get their hall passes, discipline techs around campus have immediately started to see a difference in the number of students out of class at one time.
“There’s just not the same number of kids out of class congregating and meeting up in the bathrooms,” Shelton said. The discipline techs right now are seeing a huge improvement,” Shelton said.
The administration says that through the first few weeks of school, administrators have been pleased with the outcome of the new system and plan on keeping it for the foreseeable future.
by SIMON ARAGOZA, ELIAS BARQUET, KALLISSA GREGG, ISA HERNANDEZ, CARSON NICHOLS, EMMA PHOMMARATH & LARA DE VALK
