By: Jasmine Puma and Zoey Carter 3/11/26

EJHS started the 2025-2026 school year by explaining the new rule as usual. This year was different; this year, they introduced a new resource app named Smartpass. It’s simple and has two main tasks for our school. It’s used for students to select their flex and to create passes to leave their classroom during class. These passes track what class you’re leaving, where you are going, and how long you are gone. This information is sent to the office, where they can specifically track how much instruction time you are missing. These times are added up, and once it reaches a certain point, the student can be flagged down and added to a list titled “frequent flyers” and are sent out to the teachers each month. This system was supposed to solve problems like students missing too much class time, the safety of the students out of class, and overall control over where everyone is.

 While this did solve some parts of those problems, it didn’t have enough positive benefits to cover the inconvenience to the students and even teachers. It was implemented but kept the same system of kids simply raising their hand to leave class. Teachers even claim that it can even stop the flow of class. Why keep something that has more clear negative effects than positive?

These benefits come in many different forms, A short list of benefits comes in the form of safety, practicality, and confrontation. Smartpass has the benefit of safety from the data that's given to the administrators. This data allows teachers to see how many minutes or hours of instructional time a student has lost from using their passes. Thankfully, to clear some misconceptions, the data shown is the exact amount of time you spent on a pass. For example, if you set your pass to use the bathroom for five minutes but only use two minutes, it shows up in the data as two minutes, not five. This allows easy discussions to happen, allowing the office to have secure data instead of just the words of a student or staff members. Mr. Norris also proved a great point about drill safety that Smartpass can help with, such as fire drills. He says, “We can look at our Smartpass on our phone, allowing us to see where a student is in emergencies, such as if a student is missing during a fire drill.” This can solve the major problem of students going missing or getting lost during a drill or a possible emergency.

Colton Lewis, one of the eighth-grade Social Studies teachers, explains the problems through a teacher’s perspective. Mr. Lewis says, “It’s a bother for teachers because I’ll have to stop what I’m doing to create a pass or accept a pass, so it interrupts the flow of things..” This shows that all though he also sees the benefits of it, but a student missing instruction time is just as unhelpful as them completely disrupting class to going to the bathroom for only a few minutes.. Floater students are students who tend to linger in the hallway before class starts and after it starts, often being late to class and making it difficult to find them, which is another group of students that smart pass is trying to fix. Mr. Lewis said, “I think it’s easier to address (the problem of hallway floaters), but it isn’t necessarily solving that problem,” followed by, “I think it’s going to help, but (in my opinion) the problem of hallway floaters will never be fully solved.” This proves that smart pass is a distraction in class and doesn’t even fix the problems it is supposed to efficiently.

Smartpass has slightly fixed the problem of keeping kids in class, but there is still enough data to show that frequent flyers are still out of class when they aren’t supposed to be. To use a pass, you still have to raise your hand, interrupt class, and take the time to open the app and create your pass. Emergencies can be overlooked and cause a disaster. Since this is Smartpass’s first year being implemented at EJHS, administrators are still trying to prove it is the best thing to do for the junior high students. These concerns did not just appear, the students have been, on many counts, written anonymous complaints to student voice about the program. So while the program grows and changes with our school, it is not on a beneficial track for the students in class.

Sources: Mr. Norris, Mr. Lewis, Frequent Fliers, and Administrators