At the start of the 2024 to 2025 school year, the students at Troy Athens High School found themselves adjusting to a new hallway pass system. This new hallway pass system was quite different from what the students were used to from years prior.
The hallway system at Troy Athens High School used to be the same as the one currently used at Troy High School: students were allowed to take a physical pass from their classrooms and head out into the hallway. However, at the start of the new school year, students were informed of a change to this system in their first hour classes. Phuong Giang, a senior at Troy Athens High School, mentioned how she “honestly thought that it was going to be a disturbance to classes.”
The high school has changed out the traditional physical hallway passes for something more modern. Students are now required to use their Troy School District iPads through an app called Securely Pass in order to leave the classroom during class time.
Securely, the parent company of Securely Pass, markets themselves as leaders in K-12 safety and wellness, providing educators with a tool to form Securely Aware to help keep track of students wellness to Securely Pass ensuring campus safety. According to the Securly website, the CEO Tammy Wincup comments that, “Securly is fiercely dedicated to developing innovative student safety and wellness solutions that help our school leaders and educators keep students safe, secure, and ready to learn.”
It’s through the Securly Pass app that students must send a digital request, which includes their name, reason for departure from the class and the time. This request is sent to their teachers which is then approved by the teachers on their own
iPads, it’s only then the students are allowed to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. Once the request is accepted by the teacher, the Securly Pass app starts a timer to track how long the students are out until they return and the teacher ends the timer indicating that the student has returned to the classroom.
With this new system, teachers are able to more easily keep track of how long and how many times students go out of their classrooms. This prevents students from meeting up in the bathroom for a variety of activities, such as vaping, bullying and vandalism.
Students at Troy Athens High School feel conflicted about this new change, some of them, while they understand the reason behind the changes, find the new process to be inconvenient. Giang commented, “I don’t like it, it’s very annoying. Frankly I understand somewhat why they do it, but I feel like a regular hall pass should suffice.”
Another student, Helisa He, a senior at Troy Athens High School, noted that while the new system was initially annoying, her opinion has since changed. She remarks that “It’s definitely better than before”, stating that the more complicated system disincentivizes leaving a classroom at all.
He and Giang both noticed how the implementation of Securely Pass has been effective in discouraging students from skipping classes using the hall pass as the teachers can now properly keep a timer on how long they have left the classroom.
Securely Pass provides Troy Athens High School a new digital way to ensure campus safety at the school as students adapt to these changes.
