Since the horrifying Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, schools around the country have stepped back to reexamine their safety policies to ensure they take every measure possible to prevent another tragedy. Park has joined the ranks of thousands of elementary, junior and senior high schools in shoring up its policies for precisely this purpose—but in the case of hall passes, the school has instituted a policy forcing disruption of  students and their teachers without any apparent safety improvements.

The policy, as explained by assistant principal Scott Meyers, abolishes the previous permanent passes and requires students to obtain passes on a case-by-case basis from the teacher whose work the students plan to do in the media center, or wherever else they intend to do it. The ultimate goal of the policy serves to ensure that a school official can account for every student in the school through avoiding student abuse permanent passes through not working where they say they will.

This goal undoubtedly holds the utmost importance, and absolutely nothing ever should come before student safety. While the over-issuing permanent passes created many problems in locating students, the new policy not only fails to improve on the system, it forces both students and teachers to waste their time acquiring and writing passes.

Because policy restricts students’ study hall teachers from writing passes and forces them to obtain them from the teacher whose work they intend to do, students must either barge into that teacher’s class mid-lesson, or disobey the policy and obtain the pass from another teacher every single time they would like to work in the media center or another area of study. Not only does the new system breed dishonesty, it also offers no ostensible improvement to student safety from last year’s system of students checking in with their study hall teachers before heading out with their permanent passes.

In meeting with Scott Meyers to voice these concerns, he stood by the system but appeared aware of its flaws and open to improving it. In discussion, some potential alternatives were offered: perhaps reinstitute the permanent passes on a limited basis, or perhaps have media center specialists mark students for attendance, or better yet, allow students to scan their ID’s as a way of ensuring students are where they are supposed to be (at least then they can use their ID’s for something).

The meeting came to an end as Meyers said he would explore these options. Three weeks later, he said he was still “looking into the issue,” and since then, Park has made no changes to the policy.

Still, the most frustrating part of the whole ordeal came in a comment from Meyers, who put the issue to rest with a single remark: “Just know you’ve been heard,” he said as the meeting concluded. A month after being heard, the issue still remains a concern. But hey, at least they students were heard.