When students leave the classroom at Bishop Union School, they use a hall pass. The hallpasses that we use are lanyards with a card saying that it is a hall pass and the name of the teacher’s class you are leaving. These hall passes have been used for years and have never been cleaned. Hall passes are brought everywhere around campus including the bathroom.
According to The American Journal of Infection Control, only 58% of female and 48% of male middle and high school students washed their hands after using the bathroom. This means that almost half of the students are touching the passes with fecal matter or urine residue on their hands and then are touching the hall pass and that residue then gets passed to the next student as soon as they come into contact with it.
Students in California are missing an average of 16 school days a year due to illness. That is 50% above the national average. The state of California says frequently touched surfaces at schools should be cleaned every day, to combat the spread of germs that are making these students sick.
Originally my idea to solve this was to replace hall passes with classroom logs. According to Mr. Forsmen, Hall passes and logs are completely different. Logs are used to see when students are in the bathroom and would only be used if there was an issue in the bathroom including graffiti or vaping. So I looked for another solution.
Hall passes are also necessary to tell if someone is allowed on campus. At Bishop Union High School we have an open campus with no security checkpoints making sure that only students and staff are on campus. If every person out of class is carrying a hall pass it makes it really easy for our administrators to identify suspicious people, and remove them from campus.
My solution is to have passes that are entirely made out of plastic, and have cleaning wipes with an antibacterial chemical in them like bleach, by the door and routinely cleaned by the teacher and students.
Plastic is a non-porous material and would keep most bacteria on the surface so a quick wipe with a Clorox wipe would easily kill almost all of the bacteria on the hall passes.
Another idea would be to encourage students to wash their hands more often. This would help solve the problem from the source, of course, this task is not something that will be easily accomplished. One way to help with this would be to display posters of the risks of not washing your hands and the statistics on how much illness would help lower how often they get sick.
I hope that our school will take steps to make hall passes more sanitary, I mean do you really want to be touching fecal matter multiple times a day?
