The Problem With Passes by John

The Problem With Passes by John - December 2025 Scholarship Essay

The number one way I would hope to positively impact my school is by changing the regulations on bathroom-passes. Within my school, the abuse of bathroom-passes has been a major issue over my four years here. During my freshman year, people would take the bathroom-pass and just walk the halls on their phones, so the school responded by having certain members of the staff in the halls to make sure students were using passes properly. The student body then adapted to the new environment and started only using their phones in the bathrooms.
The school’s next attempt to solve the issue was to make students use a sign-out sheet when going to the bathroom to stop certain students from preventing others from using it as intended. The problem with that solution was that there was nobody to enforce it. Teachers weren’t going to interrupt their lessons to verify that a student was using the time sheet properly, so students just didn’t fill it out. Students that truly needed the bathroom-pass weren’t able to use it because some weren’t using it as intended. The school’s latest response has been to continue the past policies while adding a policy that has students trade their phone for the pass. But there’s no way to tell if that would work, because they also added a policy limiting the number of passes a student may use per-trimester. I feel as though this latest policy is going too far.
The latest policy my school has adopted is unfair to students. I strongly believe that just trading a phone for a pass would be a reasonable solution to the issue, but there’s no way to know as the school didn’t even give it a real chance. Instead they made a policy that is unfair to students, specifically female students. It is unreasonable to limit students to ten bathroom breaks total per-trimester. I intentionally used the word breaks because the only time to use the bathroom at school without a pass is during lunch or in between classes. Our lunch break is already cut short from the thirty minutes that it should be because the five minutes passing time afterwards is now included in the thirty minutes to eat. When around six hundred students are trying to get through a lunch line and eat within twenty-five minutes, their time is already rushed. The five-minute passing time between classes is also unreasonable because our school is over capacity. With upwards of two thousand and four hundred students in the halls between each class and only four student bathrooms for each gender in the building, it is impossible for students to go to the restroom between classes. I have seen a line going out of the girl’s bathroom almost every passing period since this policy was enacted, and most of them don’t even get their chance to go before the bell rings.
Ten bathroom breaks per-trimester is unreasonable and must be changed. If I were to become student body president, I would argue this line of reasoning with my school’s administration to get change. I believe that the best way to overcome this issue of bathroom-pass abuse is to remove the per-trimester limit. Better yet, also increase passing times to seven minutes. I believe these two changes to school policies would greatly assist our bathroom-pass problem and would restore the opportunity for people who truly need to go to the bathroom to do so.