Here at WHS, students and teachers/staff tend to disagree about how to handle different things. For instance, the limited hall passes. Students feel like we need the freedom and teachers/staff seem to think that freedom leads to students getting away with things or doing the wrong thing with the expectation that they have that freedom.

There’s some issues with how much control is too much and how much control is too little. There should be a balance of freedom and control in order to ensure as little chaos as necessary. With too much control, it can feel suffocating to students and often leads to students rebelling and breaking rules just to feel more free. Without enough control, things get chaotic; everyone starts doing their own things and nothing gets accomplished. Right now, our school is having trouble finding that balance.

Students are convinced that the limited passes aren’t going to do any good while Staff seem to either hate or love the limited passes. The limited hall passes were meant to help cut down traffic in the halls, however, students were never given a decent reason as to why hall traffic needed to be cut down. In a video the Howl produced, Mr. Abuhl claims that it had a lot to do with kids skipping class and sometimes having fake hall passes. If that’s the case, why not figure out who is innocent and who isn’t rather than punishing everyone? The same thing happened with the Coyote Grounds closing.

The limited passes take away students’ right to go to the bathroom. As humans, we deserve to be able to take care of ourselves and the school is taking away those rights. On the first and second floor, there is one bathroom for girls and one bathroom for guys per floor. There’s only four stalls and 4 minutes passing time. There’s hundreds of students on each floor and so few bathrooms with little to no time to go to the bathroom. Teachers tend to like to use the excuse “You should’ve gone during passing time”, which sometimes can’t happen so it’s unfair to use that as an excuse not to let students go to the bathroom. The limited passes, in general, aren’t fair.

If students are skipping class, find them and punish them alone. Don’t punish the whole school for something that most of them aren’t doing. We get only 10 passes per quarter. That’s about 1 pass a week. Punishing everyone has negative results that no one really pays attention to. “Collective punishment can create a perverse incentive to misbehave. If you know you’re going to be punished despite not having committed a crime, you might as well commit the crime – you’re paying for it after all” (David Didau 8). By punishing all the students, you are simply encouraging students to break the rules. The idea of collective punishment is to scare students into behaving and to know that your actions can/will affect your peers. The only issue is that it doesn’t work.

It’s up to the school to find something that does work but they tend to disregard student opinions when it comes to things like this. I decided to go and ask students what their initial opinion was of the limited hall passes. Mia Struckness (sophomore) said, “I see where the school was going with the limited hall passes system but I don’t really see how it’s helping; if a kid really wants to get out of class, they’re going to do so regardless of the pass system. Besides, it’s not like teachers ever ask to see a kid’s passes when they’re in the hall. And what if there’s an emergency and you’re out of passes? Or you lost them? I just think it’d be better to punish the kids who were taking advantage of the passes, not everyone. Besides, if someone wants to skip out on class, that’s their own choice and their own grades being affected”. Essentially, she is saying that the limited hall passes takes away freedom and choices that we, as students, deserve to have.

You might be asking, what should the school do to prevent students from skipping or using fake passes. A common theme I heard from students was to focus on the kids that they know are skipping first rather than punishing everyone. I also heard many kids say that we should have more passes if they’re going to enforce the limited passes. One student, Jace Radke, said “Like create a programming or something that registers the passes online. Teachers [should put] the students name on a list online registering [to say] that they are permitted”. All the students I interviewed thought that there were better ways of going about the issue.

Works Cited

Didau, David. “Collective punishment”. Learning Spy. Paragraph 8. learningspy.co.uk/behaviour/collective-punishment/. Accessed 10 February 2019.