The bell just rang to signify the start of third period. Class is settling in, and you figure you have time to make a quick run to the water fountain to fill up your bottle. “Hey can I go fill this up?” you ask your teacher, pointing to the water fountain just outside of the room. “Yeah, just write out a pass,” the teacher says, crushing all your hopes and dreams. What was meant to be a one minute sidestep to the water fountain has just turned into a five month excursion. We all know this feeling, the feeling that sometimes hall passes are extremely pointless.

Of course I understand the purpose of passes: to make sure all students are accounted for and to prevent aimless roaming throughout the hallways. Although this is the core purpose, it is enforced way too strictly. Students should not need a pass to “go to a locker two feet out the door,” explains Bailey King ’16. Getting a pass is often more trouble than it’s worth and is “just wasting more time,” King says.

Many students share the frustration of having to get a pass during lunch. Lunch time is supposed to be our free period, and if someone has to go to the bathroom in the middle of eating a PB&J sandwich, they should be at liberty to do so. When students pass the intersection during lunch, hallway monitors are always demanding passes. Sometimes students are coming to lunch five minutes late because they were talking with a teacher and it simply slipped their mind to get a piece of paper signed. Instead of being celebrated for seeking extra help, students are sent back to where they came from and refused passage to a hallway within their own school.

That’s another thing that makes no sense: being sent back to get a pass. If you are already at your destination, what sense does it make to travel all the way back again after getting a pass? This signed piece of paper only has the validity we have bestowed upon it, but it really should not have this higher importance.

Once again, I do understand the purpose of passes, but I do not agree with the strictness to which they are enforced, and to the teachers out there reading this thinking I’m talking about the time you made me get a pass, I know it’s not your fault. Everyone is just following the orders to equate a hall pass with a hundred dollar bill.