“Who are you? Where are you coming from? Do you have permission to be here?” These questions might sound like they were taken straight out of a CIA interrogation room, but CHS students experience such questioning daily when they walk through the hallways.

The unnecessarily strict enforcement of hall passes this year has turned our once-friendly halls into  frequently-patrolled restricted-access zones. Students must carry hall passes with their name, where they are coming from, where they are going, the time, the date and a signature from their teacher through the hallways or risk being escorted back to class. In order to fill out these tedious permission slips, teachers often have to halt classroom instruction.

It is ridiculous that students (some of whom might need to use the bathroom really, really badly) are being dragged back to their classrooms to have their teacher write down the exact destination of the student just so  security is sure that the student is not wandering the hallways mindlessly. The silly and unnecessary process wastes students’ and teachers’ time.

Not only does this practice detract greatly from class instruction time, but it also calls the teachers’ professionalism into question. Teachers are more than capable of deciding which students should get hall passes and which should not. Security and  administration should trust the teachers judgment in allowing a responsible student to go to the bathroom without providing unnecessary details.

Stopping students to check if they have a satisfactory pass is taking away from valuable class time, and is only going to strain the relationship be-tween the students, teachers and the security team.

For the policy to be effective and ensure students are not skipping class, patrolling at each area of the school needs to be equal at all times. It seems that enforcement varies among the different hallways of the school, placing some students at a disadvantage solely based on the location of their classroom.

While this policy is supposedly being imposed on all students, the small population the administration should be worried about is still leaving school. So before the administration gets worked up about a hall pass that does not specify whether the student can go to the water fountain or bathroom, they should look behind them for the kid sneaking out of school.