SmartPass should be banned. There have been many rising conflicts regarding smartpass with the students and admin that need to be settled.

Some background on smartpass. Smartpass was introduced two to three years ago in 2023 when I started my freshman year of high school. Going into high school and not knowing anything, this new smart pass rule was confusing. In the second week of school, an assembly was held for each grade, and in this assembly they introduced smart pass.

This app was designed to track students when they leave class and monitor how long they take. At first this was understandable because a minority of students who say they are going to the “bathroom” actually go meet up with their friends and mess around in the hallways causing disruptions to classrooms. The biggest issue was students participating in the “devious licks challenge”. This involved students destroying the bathroom for a challenge on TikTok and administration needed a way to catch these students who were vandalizing the bathrooms.

After this challenge it was understandable that the admin wanted to hold students accountable for their faults, but why punish everyone when it's a minority causing disruptions? When SmartPass was recently reintroduced, admin expressed that students would be getting in trouble for using their three passes each day. But now, they have implemented two passes per day.

Many scientists have shown that students should use the bathroom every 2-3 hours. There are eight hours of a school day, but taking out lunch, breaks between classes and ten minute break, we sit in a classroom for seven hours in total. Students should at least use the bathroom three times per school day, so why is admin limiting our passes to two per day? “Restricting access to the bathroom forces students into unhealthy toileting habits, such as holding in urine, which may create health problems that will follow students into adulthood and decrease their quality of life,” said the article, Survey Of School Nurses Reveals Lack Of Bathroom Policies And Bladder Health Education.

Students should not be forced to hold in their bladder and create these issues that will follow them for the rest of their life because the admin decided to make an app that tracks us and restricts our needs. If they want to keep restricting the students' needs, they are expected to pay for the hospital bills when the student later in life has a serious issue with their bladder from having to hold it in during school hours.

On the other side, an argument that would help admins point to why they won't open the bathroom during ten minute break is because students abuse this privilege. Many students have gotten caught skipping or even smoking in the bathroom during their ten minute break. Just during the first week of school, multiple students got suspended for smoking, which shows why the bathrooms are closed, but now that there are smoke detectors in the bathroom, this shouldn't be an issue. Those smoke detectors are made to detect anything in the air, even perfume, so if a student was smoking in the bathroom during the break they could search for them and find what they are looking for. While this process might take a while, admin now uses a metal detector that helps speed up and enhance the process. Students should now be discouraged to smoke since many regulations have been set in place, knowing they will get caught.

This issue is not just in Charter; it's in other schools all over the world. Students are constantly going on social media platforms to express their dislike in admin limiting their bathroom passes. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are the most popular ones where students post “story times” showing how physically and emotionally these restrictions affect them. Students all over the world have already expressed that enough is enough, so when is it going to stop?

Admin has abused their power over the students when implementing SmartPass. Cameras are enough to secure what students are doing and seeing if everything is in place. Admin and the government are becoming more alike than ever when wanting to control people and this has to stop. SmartPass should be banned.