Whether you need to go use the bathroom or take a break from a teacher’s lesson, the red lanyard bathroom pass is almost always never there. Instead in reality, it might be in the hands of a classmate who is walking a 5K around the hallways.
Even though students are expected to go to the bathroom with it, there’s not much enforcement around roaming the halls with a pass. Consequently, it’s normalized for students to be skipping class with the great power of these passes.
To a great extent, this time outside of the classroom from one student contributes to burdening everyone else. Teachers, who want to provide instruction to these students, struggle to form lasting relationships if they cut class by skipping. On the other hand, classmates who actually need to use the bathroom cannot.
“It’s frankly annoying because there are kids who legitimately need to use the bathroom and when the bathroom pass is just gone for long stretches of time, it makes it harder for the kids who are actually following the rules to do their thing,” English teacher Sasha Duran-Russell said.
This form of skipping is unjust and unreasonable to students, as junior Bryan Reyes Bermudez points out: “It’s abusing your privilege of leaving class to use the bathroom. Others have to go to get a sip of water or use the bathroom,” he said. “Wasting time is not the move.”
Despite the infringement of the bathroom pass’s honor code among students, classrooms might see more effective housekeeping progression with more communication.
In one of Duran-Russell’s classes, her students gradually learned accountability and held it for others in regards to using the pass.
“When two or three students in one class were the problem kids, the other students who got frustrated enough to say something about it, now actually time those students,” Duran-Russell said. “They’re using positive peer pressure to get things done and get the kids to come back in a timely manner.”
If more students and teachers embraced this approach, the bathroom pass could finally serve its true purpose: giving students a needed break without encroaching on their learning.
