In the old days, when a student requested a bathroom visit during classroom time, the teacher handed them a hall pass made of paper or sometimes a wooden block. Now, many schools are taking the hall pass digital with SmartPass, a hall pass application that tracks students and generates weekly reports about trends in their movements.
“Students are getting smarter and sneakier than ever, and you may not know that Betty and Bob have been meeting up every afternoon for the last two weeks, but SmartPass knows,” an advertising video directed at school administrators says, while explaining a new feature called Encounter Detection. “Behind the scenes, we are using artificial intelligence to see which students have passes to similar rooms around the same time, and presenting you with actionable data to start a conversation.”
For example, the data may show that two students from different classrooms asked to go to the water fountain five times last week, and their hall pass time overlapped for a few minutes each time. The weekly report also shows administrators how many total hall passes were generated, a list of student names and profiles ranking students from the highest number of passes used, how many teachers approved passes and how many encounters were prevented.