By Madilyn Ruiter
Before Lamoille Union High School indefinitely closed for the remainder of the school year, teachers and administration had started to implement stricter guidelines for hall pass standards.
The new enforcement behind hall passes was to keep students safe while in the building, according to principal Brian Schaffer, “[our] primary responsibility is our students safety.” Schaffer also added that it is hard for faculty to keep students safe if they are not in class.
The general consensus among the faculty at Lamoille Union is that hall passes keep students accountable. Students were required to let teachers know where they were going and what they were going to be doing. According to Andrea Bourdeau, the OR supervisor, hall passes had eliminated “mysterious ‘I don’t knows’ ” when students were confronted in the halls.
The effects of hall passes were already present before the school was closed. “There’s been a lot less traffic in the hallways,” Bourdeau said. School resource officer Katie Palmer also agreed that things had been going well, “I think everyones doing a really good job of adapting to what we are asking.”
There have been a few concerns regarding the guidelines for pass though. Bourdeau said that it was hard to write passes for kids that needed break from class because they didn’t have specific locations. To solve this issue Bourdeau was issuing passes that said “permission from OR to have a five minute walking break.”
Palmer also had concerns about bathroom passes. Palmer believes that the passes should specify which bathroom students were supposed to be heading to,“I think they [bathroom pass] should specify which bathroom you can use.”
Other measures had also been taken to keep students out of the halls. During passing periods, office hours, and common ground teachers were poste around the school to check in with students about where they were going and what they were doing.
English teacher Michael Potvin told us at the Blue & Gold how he had been issuing passes and keeping students in class. For his class Potvin had a bathroom pass and had just incorporated a sign in and out sheet for other locations in the school. According to Potvin everything seemed “To be working really well.”
During our interview Potvin pointed out that the halls were mostly empty, “Right now we’re standing in the halls during common ground time, which at the beginning of the year was a problem time, but it’s now not a problem at all.” he continued by saying, “Hopefully students have found places that they enjoy being and are using the time [common ground] productively.”
Blue & Gold 