When the Lincoln school district in Nebraska brought in a new superintendent in 2022, it was the perfect time to address longstanding student behavior problems with fresh eyes.
The then-new superintendent of the 42,000-student district, Paul Gausman, hosted a series of meetings with administrators and teachers to drill down on the most prominent problem areas. Two key themes emerged: the need for updated guidelines on students’ cellphone use, and a way to address “out-of-class time”—when students are not in the classroom during instructional time. (Gausman recently announced his retirement.)
“Our high school principals started to talk about students’ time out of class, and they were talking about the challenge of how many kids were out of class, how much instructional time was being lost, and then the difficulty of trying to determine which kids had a pass to be out of class, which kids didn’t have a pass, and how that was impacting tardies and truancy,” said Jessie Fries, the Lincoln district’s director of secondary education.
The feedback presented an interesting convergence of two hot topics in education—cellphones and lost instructional time—and an opportunity for Lincoln to “be a proactive leader in addressing common problems,” Fries said.
During 2022 summer school courses, the district started piloting both new cellphone rules that prohibit students from using their devices during classes and a new digital hall pass system to better track and manage students’ out-of-class time. The pilot has since expanded to the district’s eight high schools.
Digital hall passes aren’t a new phenomenon in schools—some districts have employed them for years to manage hallway traffic.
What’s less common, though, is for digital hall passes—sometimes managed with cellphones—to coexist with cellphone restrictions. But for Lincoln, the two measures work in tandem to cut down on phone-induced distractions, limit the time students spend outside the classroom, and prevent student conflicts and fighting—all problems educators have cited in recent years as growing barriers to kids’ learning.
School leaders have made tweaks to improve digital hall passes
In Lincoln, students may request a hall pass with the push of a button on their school-issued laptops using the district’s online platform. Their teacher then receives the request on their device, and can either approve or deny the pass.
If it’s approved, the student can leave the room and head to their requested location. The passes are valid for a predetermined amount of time—seven minutes for a bathroom break, two minutes to refill a water bottle, and so on—and students have to be back in the classroom when time runs out.
During the summer school pilot, teachers reported it was disruptive to have to approve a hall pass request on their computers if they were in the middle of a lecture or otherwise away from their desks, Fries said. So, the district worked with the product developer to set up a mode that allows students to request a pass, then verbally ask their teacher for permission to leave before they can approve the pass themselves on their own laptops, eliminating the need for the teacher to step away from their lesson. A teacher can intervene if a student tries to leave the classroom without a pass, but Fries said Lincoln hasn’t had problems with students abusing the system.
Students don’t carry a physical pass when they leave the room. Instead, the district’s security staff, teachers, and administrators have access to the dashboard that shows which students have active hall passes and where they’re allowed to go. So, if a staff member sees a student in the hallway, they can pull up the system on their phone or tablet and confirm the student has permission to be out of class.
An unexpected perk: Staff members in the front office are better prepared to greet students who have a pass to visit them.
“We even got feedback from some of our secretaries, who said, ‘I actually knew what kids were coming to me because they were sending a pass come to the office, and I could greet that student by name, because I was expecting that student to come,’” Fries said. “That’s a small thing, but it matters.”
The system also allows administrators to use the dashboard to limit how many students have active passes to specific rooms or areas of the school at once. So, if a bathroom only has three stalls, administrators can make it so only three hall passes can be active for that particular bathroom at the same time. If a student requests a hall pass to a destination that is already at maximum capacity, the system puts them on a waitlist and their pass is approved once another student leaves.
Administrators can also restrict specific students—say, those who frequently meet up during class time or are known for having run-ins—from receiving passes to the same places at the same time, even if they are in different classes.
In these situations, the cellphone limits and digital hall passes “really do marry nicely with one another,” Fries said.
“If I’m a student, not only can I not have my cellphone in class, but then when I leave class, then I also haven’t set up a time to meet somebody outside of class, because I haven’t had a way to communicate with them,” she said.
Digital hall passes offer flexibility and provide information during emergencies
Digital hall passes also offer an extra layer of security for students in an emergency, said Nelle Biggs, the principal of Summit Middle School in Frisco, Colo., which uses virtual hall passes and instituted new cellphone restrictions requiring students put away their phones during the day at the start of the 2023-24 school year.
If there’s a lockdown or evacuation and a student is out of the classroom, administrators can look up in the hall pass system where that student was supposed to be, Biggs said. That has helped assuage some parents’ concerns about not being able to contact their children on their cellphones during the school day, said Erin Dillon, the school’s assistant principal.
“The only real pushback we got to the cellphones being away for the day was those situations in case of emergency and how parents would be able to communicate,” Dillon said. “I think the hall pass system actually helps us, since we are able to know exactly where kids are in instances of an emergency.”
Another perk: Administrators can limit the number of passes students receive each day (Summit’s limit is three) and institute a “cooling-off period,” so students can’t request a new pass until at least an hour has passed since their last request.
The school can raise or lower students’ daily pass allotment depending on their individual needs, Dillon said.
“It’s a way to help students learn time management, because they have these three passes, these three resources, and they choose how they’re going to use them, which is an important skill for them to develop,” Biggs added. “Before a system like this was in place, a student could get away with being like, ‘I’m in this new class and the teacher doesn’t know I just went to the bathroom, so I’m going to go again.’ So staff has more information, too.”
Schools report fewer behavioral problems and better attendance
Since implementing the new cellphone restrictions and the virtual hall passes, the Lincoln district has experienced both measurable and qualitative benefits, Fries said.
In a district survey, 98 percent of teachers said student attendance in their individual classes was either unchanged, improved, or greatly improved since the initiatives started. School suspensions for “major rule violations,” such as physical altercations or attacks, Fries said, were down about 20 percent in the first year of implementation.
“Students were in classes, they were engaged in their learning, and so therefore some of those behaviors that we were seeing just weren’t happening as frequently,” she said. “The more we can be preventative, the less time we spend being reactive to situations that come up.”
At Summit Middle School, teachers and administrators have noticed a sizable decrease in the time they spend dealing with disruptions during instructional time, both in and out of the classroom, Biggs said.
The virtual hall passes and cellphone restrictions aren’t magic. There are still problems, she said, but they have helped.
“We were dealing with discipline issues where kids were taking pictures of each other over the stalls or bullying each other online with their friends, which hasn’t disappeared now, but it’s not the No. 1 issue during the day anymore, and we’re not spending our time managing that,” Biggs said. “It’s been a positive for the kids’ mental health, positive for running the school, and positive for them building social and interpersonal skills.”
