The Failures of Smartpass

I think I’m not alone when I say that my opinion on SmartPass is negative.

Since the software, intended to act as a virtual hall pass, was implemented in our school last year, it has proven itself to be, for the sake of simplicity, problematic. Inconvenience, impractical time limits, and a lack of enforcement born from the frustration of both teachers and students alike show that SmartPass is less of the modern, intelligent alternative to hall passes that its name suggests, and more of a nuisance, in my experience.

While many classrooms have integrated the usage of students’ laptops into their lessons, there are still a considerable amount that prefer to use paper and pencil most of the time. If a student in one of these classes, or any student who doesn’t have their laptop at that very moment, needs to use the bathroom, they can no longer just take a pass and go if SmartPass is enforced—instead, they need to go through the trouble of taking out their laptop, turning it on, and logging into Classlink before they can even click on the SmartPass website. Those few seconds or minutes add up, especially when you need to go, and why do we have to endure this when a paper pass is hanging on the wall next to you? And what do you do when your laptop is dead or broken?

If the inefficiency of getting onto the SmartPass website wasn’t problematic enough, then the maddening limits on when someone can make a pass should be discussed as well. While the bathrooms are unlocked for most of the day, you are unable to make a pass during the first or last ten minutes of a period. The problem is, those are usually the most optimal times to use the bathroom, since teachers are setting up or wrapping up their lessons. By only being able to leave in the middle of class, students are forced to miss potentially crucial content being taught and material that can help them in the long run. Often during the times outside the “No Fly Zone,” the pass limit for the bathroom you’re closes to has been reached already.

On the topic of time limits, let’s also take a look at the timer SmartPass sets up, and the fact that it can only be set to a maximum of 5 minutes. This maximum fails to consider not only the time it takes for a student to get to the bathroom, but also the fact that it’s barely enough time to cover using the bathroom in general. I’m certain that many students have come back to their SmartPass timer a couple minutes late nearly every time they’ve gone to the bathroom.

At this point, you may be thinking that these issues with SmartPass aren’t that bad, even if you’ve experienced them yourself. After all, have you ever been punished for a bathroom visit taking more than 5 minutes? Don’t most teachers relent when you need to go within the 10 minutes after class started and let you use the bathroom anyway? Yes, many teachers don’t fully enforce SmartPass—but I’d argue that is another sign that its implementation has been not that successful. I have overheard teachers complaining about SmartPass many times since last year, going on about how it’s complicated a system that used to be as easy as grabbing a piece of paper and leaving. If students and teachers alike are unhappy with it or are finding it impractical, isn’t it time to do something about it?

To summarize, I cannot see why SmartPass is used at our school. If the point was to have a system for logging bathroom trips to try to fix graffiti and other issues, we already had a more practical option: sign-in sheets. And last time I checked, those weren’t far more inconvenient for what they were worth.