The hallways at Baldi Middle School are calm, but with over 1,500 students to keep track of, principal Bianca Gillis said, trouble sometimes crops up — children attempting to meet up in the bathroom to do their makeup, or vape, or otherwise cause trouble.
Gillis has wanted to use a digital hall pass system to be able to keep tabs on students leaving class for three years, since she came to the Northeast Philadelphia school. This year, the Philadelphia School District bought in, and Gillis is an enthusiastic early adopter.
“We need to be able to manage our students, know who’s in the hallways, make sure that they’re safe,“ Gillis said. ”And so this is a perfect way for us to know where they are, who’s out of the room, for how long.”
In all, 37 of the district’s 216 schools have opted into the digital hall pass, said John Spencer, deputy chief of school climate and culture. Schools were given the ability to use the digital hall pass, but not required to do so.
Baldi occupies a sprawling building — and trailers to accommodate its oversized population — on Verree Road, and keeping track of its sixth through eighth grade students with physical hall passes could be tough, Gillis said.
Gillis is all in on the digital system, which allows teachers to set time limits for passes — typically, five minutes for a bathroom pass, though that can be adjusted if a student is ill, or needs more time for other reasons.
The digital hall pass also gives teachers the ability to restrict certain children from having hall passes at the same time: those who have conflict with each other, or friend groups that have historically gotten into trouble when out of class together.
Gillis showed the system off to Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. Wednesday, saying it’s worked well in the three weeks since it went live.
She showed Watlington a sample hall pass, clicking on a student’s name to generate a pass.
“Now, if you look down here, there is a component that says ‘hall pass restricted,’” Gillis said. “Those are for kids that we don’t let out at the same time because they’re mischievous. Maybe they text each other and say we’re going to do our makeup on the upper level bathroom. Not today.”
Some privacy concerns have been raised about digital hall passes in New York City schools, where some students and others have said they don’t like feeling rushed in the bathroom, or the surveillance aspect.
The digital pass operates through Infinite Campus, the student information system already used by the district.
Inside Megan Gallagher’s classroom, where eighth graders were working on a lesson about the novel Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe García McCall, Gallagher said the new tool took some getting used to, but “I think the rewards justify the effort.”
Atifa Jariwala, one of Gallagher’s students, said she didn’t mind the digital pass.
But Khyier Bruce, another eighth grader in Gallagher’s class, is not a fan, frankly.
“I don’t like it because sometimes my friends take too long in the bathroom, and then I can’t use it,” Khyier said.
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