By: Kayla Murphy and Mary Kenyon

Have you ever been sitting in class and you feel your eyes start to get heavy? Or maybe it’s cold and you wish you had your jacket? You could have drank a decent amount of water and need to use the restroom. All reasons to get up and leave the classroom for a little while. Whether it’s to keep yourself from falling asleep, freezing or “having an accident”, with the new rule in place, these trips out of the room are impossible to do without a signed pass stating your next location.

Although the right to leave the classroom has not been taken away from us completely, it’s being limited. Freshman, Kendra Murphy says she “feels like she is being babied”, especially since there wasn’t a pass system in Gibbons.  The old rule of signing out of the room you’re in makes sense, in case of an emergency or to estimate how much class time you’re really missing. However, it is an inconvenience to write out a pass every time you need to leave, and interrupting your teacher to get it signed is a little excessive. We (the students) range from ages fourteen to eighteen and should be able to go to the bathroom without a signature from the adult in the room. Some of us are adults ourselves! Becca Siegal, junior, thinks of it as “administration not trusting us when we have done nothing wrong.”

All together the hall pass mandates seems unnecessary. It is more of an issue than a solution to problem that was never there. Signing out of a classroom was a more ideal way to leave the room, and if a single student took advantage of it then his/her teacher could deal with that on a more personal level and limit those students’ privileges. Instead, the whole school is affected and is feeling punished for doing nothing wrong.