With the start of the 2022-23 school season, many students were surprised to find a new policy concerning the ability to leave the classroom involving hall passes.

This digital hall pass policy requires students to either scan a QR code or go online and fill out a short google form in order to leave. The form completed by the student asks questions such as where the student is going, what period it is and the student’s email address. This information, upon submission, is transferred into a google sheets document, which all teachers have access to. 

This digital hall pass works to ensure that teachers can keep track of students leaving the classroom in case a student goes missing. With this, the school can quickly determine where the student was going if anything goes wrong.

Although this policy is new to Granville, school policies like this are nothing new to school districts in Ohio. In fact, both Mrs. Hanby and Mr. Hinton came from school districts with this policy. 

Safety in the school is one of the largest priorities teachers and the administration have for the students. As the acting assistant principal for GHS, Mrs. Hanby has to consider all students’ safety and well-being. 

“Safety is our number one priority and Mr. Hinton and I wanted to ensure that we could know where our students are when they are not in their designated classroom,” Hanby said. 

This new policy helps to achieve this goal of school safety because it allows teachers and administrators to quickly find students in case of an unforeseen emergency. 

The responsibility the school has for the safety of its students is something that can be felt by some members of the student body. 

“It’s important to have a hall pass system in place so teachers can be aware of where students are,” freshman Sam Hanning said. 

This is part of their responsibility as educators to keep their classes together and not lose students. 

“I believe that the pass is well-intentioned, but I feel like the incentive to use it is not there sometimes,” senior Drew Cottrell said. He then went on later to explain that without any punishment for not using the pass might subsequently diminish the use over time.

According to Mrs.Hanby, the use of the pass has stayed relatively static over the duration of the school year. The statistics show that on average there are 200 to 300 uses of the pass each school day, which shows how the pass is continuing to be successful in its purpose for safety and accountability on the hand of the teachers.