When junior Noah Waxman had to use the bathroom during class and was asked to take a bright yellow bathroom pass with him, he had a lot of questions: For one, what purpose did the passes even have?

In early September, students became required to sign out and take a pass with them when leaving for the bathroom. 

The bathroom passes are used to increase safety on campus by explicitly tracking the 

whereabouts of a student and making sure students are where they are supposed to be, according to Dr. Glazer.

“[We] need to have a mechanism by which we can quickly identify who has permission to be out of class and who does not,” Glazer said.

However, several students have expressed concern about this new system. Waxman said that the passes are “unnecessary and ineffective.”

“Anytime I’m walking around without a bathroom pass, nobody stopped me or anything, so I don’t think it matters if you have a pass or not,” he said.

English teacher Nora Engel-Hall said she hasn’t seen a significant increase in security after the passes were implemented.

“From a safety perspective, it’s important to know where students are on campus and things like that,” Engel-Hall said. “I’m not confident that the bathroom passes accomplish that goal.”

Junior Neli Prabhu and Waxman hold concerns over the cleanliness of the passes. Currently, there is no official system for cleaning them. Prabhu said she believes students should wash the pass after each trip to the bathroom.

“It’s kind of disgusting that people will go to the bathroom [with the passes],” Waxman said. “And then we all have to touch the same thing. We’re just spreading germs.”

Junior Khoi Nguyen also has reservations regarding the effectiveness of the passes. Nguyen said he’s seen students continue to skip class, sometimes for up to thirty minutes.

Engel-Hall said the policy needs to be more based in “relationship building” than behavior management; in other words, she said she wants to understand what is causing a student to leave class rather than simply preventing them from doing so.  

“I think it’s important when we make school-wide decisions to have students be a part of that decision making process,” Engel-Hall said. “It has a huge impact on our day to day experience.”