5-Star perplexes students and staff alike
The transition from using planners or letting teachers decide the bathroom policy, to using 5-star to track when students leave the classroom and for how long feels extreme and unnecessary.
One of the main reasons given as to why passes are now digital is to crack down on students wandering the halls and to get a hold of the vandalism issue. While seeming like a good idea, 5-star passes being used to stop vandalism will be pointless in practice. Vandalism doesn’t often get reported immediately. By the time administrators find out about it, they could potentially have hours worth of 5-star passes to sort through.
Another issue with the passes is the fact that teachers have to sign students out. It’s unrealistic to expect teachers to stop what they’re doing or stop teaching to spend a minute or two trying to figure out how to sign out a student on 5-star. The only way around this is for teachers to have another device that students can sign themselves out on. There is already a shortage of chromebooks in the school and they should be given to students who still haven’t gotten theirs for the year, not to teachers for 5-star passes.
Those two flaws combined raises another problem, 5-star passes easily being inaccurate. Many students forget to sign back in once they return, making it look like they’re over their allotted minutes on the administration’s side of the app, despite the fact that they actually did make it back to class on time. That’ll make it even harder for them to use the 5-star app to monitor the hallways and catch kids doing what they aren’t supposed to be doing.
5-star passes also raise concerns of invasion of student privacy. On 5-star, teachers and administrators are able to see any 5-star points their students have gotten or any negative comments they have received, regardless of who has given it to them. They can also see past bathroom passes given to students by other teachers and when they left their other classes. That’s more information than teachers need to know.
On top of all of that, there are conflicting reports on whether teachers are required to use 5-star passes or not. If it’s not required, it makes it pointless to only be tracking students in some classes while others don’t have to sign out. If consistency with policies is something the school keeps trying to reinforce, the lack of clarity surrounding this new system is something they need to figure out and clear up.
Having to use 5-star passes instead of physical passes is overall a waste of time, hard to navigate and not beneficial enough to warrant changing the whole system for them.