Lafayette High School has a hall pass policy in which student have a limit of 4 hall passes per class, per semester. There are benefits and drawbacks to this policy.

YEA:

The current hall pass limits are reasonable. In total, each student has 32 hall passes per semester and 64 hall passes in a year (each student has eight classes, with 4 passes per class). There are 83 school days in the first semester and 94 days in the second semester. If properly proportioned, each student should have enough hall passes to get through the year because they would have about 2 hall passes per week.

Also, the hall pass limits are necessary. If there is no cutoff on how many hall passes a student gets and how many times they can exit the classroom, there may be a ‘skipping’ problem. Students have the possibility to leave and miss class everyday, which is counterproductive to learning.

Consistency is also an important factor solved by hall pass limits. Without limits, every classroom would be different and the system would be disorganized. Students with certain classes may be able to go to the restroom more often than other students with different classes, which is unfair. With limits, there is a dependably, organized system, so teachers don’t have to make up their own guidelines.

Limits also allow for order. This is important for administrators who patrol the halls. Without hall pass limits, their jobs would be much harder because there would be more students in the halls during class.

NAY:

Hall pass limits are not an effective, let alone reasonable, solution. They do not solve the skipping problem. Students who decide to break the rules and skip will not be stopped by simple hall passes because when there is a will, there is a way.

The outright distrust of students, made clear by hall pass limits, is discouraging. When the administration shows they have already given up on trusting students, students feel that they have no trust to earn. If respect is not given, respect will not be returned. Therefore, students may be less motivated to behave and more prone skipping class.

Such limits are also very inconvenient for students who do not want to skip class. They have to budget their hall passes. This is unrealistic because a student student cannot control how often they need to go to the bathroom.

According to Neil Grafstein, MD (CNN), the average person must go to the bathroom 4-7 times a day. With the hall pass policy, students have about 2 hall passes per week, so they can only go to the bathroom less than once a day (only 2 days out of a 5 day week, or 3 days without going to the bathroom). This is extremely unhealthy. When students are forced to ‘hold it in,’ it increases the possibility of contracting bladder infections.

A solution to the unhealthiness of hall pass limits is a doctor’s note. A doctor’s note can get a student an ‘unlimited hall pass’. However, few people can obtain a doctor’s note because such a note requires a medical issue and a doctor’s visit, which not everyone can afford. This is a problem, because everyone, not only people with a medical issue, need to go to the restroom more than once a day.

Are Lafayette’s hall pass limits reasonable and needed? Voice your opinion in the comments below.