Before E-hallpass was introduced, going to the restroom at school was much easier and less of a hassle. The only thing you would need to do was to grab a physical pass, if your teacher had one. Then you went to the restroom and came back to class, it was that easy. Now with E-hallpass it sucks going to the restroom.

E-hallpass was introduced last year when we just came back from online school. This was a new thing for teachers and students. We were both learning about this new website. You have to log in through Clever, set your location that you are departing from and then you set a destination, ask your teacher for permission to go to the restroom, then wait until they go to sign in (if they haven’t already), and he or she has to accept the pass if they think it’s an appropriate time to go to the restroom. 

As the year continued, the administration added  lanyards. What lanyards did was it helps teachers and staff to keep track of students to stay in a designated area for their restroom. Each part of the school has its own designated areas for a restroom that corresponds to depending on the color of your lanyard. This is used to keep track of the students to see if they are in the right area and to prevent students from wandering around in school.

 E-Hallpass has its positives and negatives. One of the good things is that the staff at school can keep track of a student when they leave class. This is a useful website because in case of an emergency like a lock down, a fire drill or something a student can be tracked down. The staff can also check if a student is taking a long time in the restroom. If a student has been out for too long the teacher can call the office and tell them to track down a student. 

Another benefit of having E-hallpass is that a student requests the pass first instead of a teacher. A student will save more time than a teacher will because a teacher has about twenty-five students per class and a student only has one teacher per period so that is a good feature about E-Hallpass. 

Another good feature about E-hallpass is that it is easily accessible for you to use on your cell phone. If a student is not using their chromebook they can just pull out their cell phone and make a pass from their pocket. 

It is also useful because it doesn’t let students make a pass if there are too many students in the restroom already.  This saves the student from going to the restroom and having to wait for the other student to finish using the restroom.. 

As useful as this website can be, there are also some inconveniences about it, such as the pass not going through so the teacher can approve it. This is an inconvenience about E-hallpass because when this happens the student has to make another one which makes it annoying for you to make another one. 

Another inconvenience about this website is that it takes a long time to make a pass. By the time you make a pass for your teacher to accept the pass you would have probably been at the restroom already. For me, the average time for making a pass would be around one minute, and that’s with having Clever bookmarks. When it is an emergency and the teacher makes you do a pass it pisses people off because you have no time to make one. It all depends on your teacher how he or she is about E-hallpass. In this situation, not having an E-hallpass is better because the student and the teacher could save some time and not interrupt class just to go to the restroom. 

Another inconvenience is that once you come back from the restroom the teacher has to end the pass and just sometimes the teacher does not or forget to end the pass making it annoying. Not ending the pass may be annoying because if you have to go somewhere else in a different period with a different teacher and  your last teacher didn’t end the pass you will have to tell your previous teacher to end it. This just makes everything more complicated than it should be. 

What would make E-Hallpass better would be to allow students to make their own pass and go. The teacher will be able to see all the students who went to the restroom and how long they took. Teachers would have to set the ground rules – when it’s appropriate to go and when it isn’t (when instructions are being given, when an activity is timed, etc.) – and it would teach responsibility. It would be the teacher’s decision to let students continue to use the restroom or stop them if they have abused the privilege. This will also not interrupt class and  can be a little more private for the students. 

E-hallpass has its benefits and its disadvantages, but if students were allowed to make their own passes it would improve the process because as of right now, E-hallpass just sucks to use.