In a significant shift for the 2025-2026 school year, AHS has introduced a new digital hall pass: the SmartPass. AHS has had a software contract with SmartPass maker Raptor Technologies for years, but for different products such as Raptor Alert. The school will pay $1,500 a year to use the new system. The digital passes will replace the myriad systems teachers had in place to manage bathroom access and, the school claims, enable teachers to focus more on teaching.
AHS’s Assistant Principal, Nina Pulatie, is in charge of rolling out and managing the system.
It “aligns with our visitor management system… and the SmartPass program also aligns with all of our class rosters,” Pulatie said. “So it streamlines [our school],” Pulatie said.
The platform permits students to create virtual hall passes on their personal Chromebooks or kiosks, computers placed in classrooms that are dedicated solely to creating SmartPasses. To create a pass, a student selects where they are going and how much time, from one to five minutes, they will take. A central algorithm then determines when they may leave the class. No more than one student is allowed out of each class at any time.
“I think you shouldn’t be limiting students’ time out of class,” AHS senior Eleanor Carroll said in reference to SmartPass’s limit of five minutes for all hall passes. “90-minute classes are long… movement of any sort is really beneficial for people.”
The SmartPass system will eventually accommodate longer breaks, said Pulatie, but it is difficult to verify where students are going. It is unclear if the system supports individualized learning plans, and some students report that it is not set up for them, but administrators maintain that SmartPass is intended to honor students’ accommodations. As adoption increases, Pulatie plans to fine-tune the system for AHS’s specific needs.
“I don’t think we’re quite there as a school,” AHS journalism teacher Sarah Ward said, “but I think the potential for that exists.”
When the system was announced, students protested by putting up posters around the school with the slogan “Big Brother is Watching: Abolish SmartPass.” The allusion to George Orwell’s 1984, while jarring, seems to be at odds with most students’ perspectives.
Several students said that, though SmartPass collects data on where they say they go, the system is not invasive and provides protection in the event of a school emergency.
“I could [activate] emergency mode, send an alert, and it actually stops all passes,” Pulatie said. “It gives us a list of kids that are out, and we can go and find them first.”
Student privacy and safety is aided by the school’s choice of features in SmartPass. Although the platform offers Detected Encounters, an AI-powered feature that monitors student activity and predicts when students meet outside of the classroom, it is currently not enabled. This status was independently verified by the Skier Scribbler at the time of publication. Hall Monitor, the system that allows teachers to check if students in the halls are where they are supposed to be, is enabled, but administrators and teachers do not think it will be used. Hall Monitor shows teachers where students are supposed to be according to their SmartPasses. It is up to teacher discretion if a student is in the wrong place.
“Nobody wants to do that,” Ward said. “Nobody has the time to do that. I can see a situation where you have a kid who is constantly not in class, and you do some one-on-one problem-solving with that kid and their counselor, and the admin, to try to figure out what’s going on and how can we help [them] be in the classroom and be present more. But I don’t see it as a general tracking system.”
Administrators further emphasized the use of SmartPass as a tool meant to simplify students leaving class for the bathroom and give them agency. The SmartPass dashboard can display which classes a student is missing and for how long, enabling their support team to address instances of missed class. The school does not plan to use the dashboard to proactively track students’ missed class time. Instead, Pulatie plans to only check the time missed when a student has an issue.
Students remain dubious of SmartPass’s effectiveness not only as a support system, but as a hall pass.
“People are still finding ways around it,” AHS junior Zoe Owen said. ”You can just say you’re in whoever’s class and going wherever, and it truly doesn’t matter… People just walk out of class.”
Pulatie wants to help all teachers eventually use SmartPass, but enforcement of the system is difficult. She does not want to tell teachers how to run their classroom. While some people remain apprehensive about SmartPass, many teachers have already grown to like the system.
“It’s been 100% more effective than any previous system I’ve ever had,” Ward said. “I think teachers really do want to use it and want it to work.”
