We went from "no phones in the classroom" to "make sure you take your phone with you to the shitter so we can make sure to track you properly" and that's pretty funny. Maybe instead of a hall pass you get "The Shit Phone" and have to sign in with your student ID.
Why do school administrators have such a strong fascination with restroom visits? Appears across geography, and across time. Someone should get to the root of this.
As someone who was actually bullied and not heard about it, maybe that's a US thing but to me that never happened in bathrooms and always in the open when teachers were not around.
I’d be willing to bet the root is a few problem kids that abuse bathroom visits, and schools don’t have a way to just deal with problem kids so they just do something broad. As with most things in schools, you should be more upset with parents that don’t teach their kids not to ruin public goods.
... I was a problem kid. Believe me, schools have ways to deal with problem kids. It doesn't require installing big brother screens in the toilet.
For me the problem was that most schools are all about memorization and thinking inside the box. Switching to a different type of school solved my issues. (smaller classes, more permissive, exploring problems and their solutions with multiple correct answers rather than simply 'memorize this thing, check the box').
We just went through a cycle where an entire nation of TikTok users were shown videos of students vandalizing bathrooms. The larger object you could steal, including entire urinals and toilets, the better. Search on "devious licks" and you'll find dozens of school districts that were fighting this problem.
At my local HS the answer was to close most of the bathrooms during class time and monitor visits, since putting live cameras in the bathrooms would cause an even larger uproar. Students always had access to a bathroom during class time, just one up near the admin offices that could be more closely observed.
During my junior year at high school, someone wrote a bomb threat as a joke on the stall. Suddenly every building entry had a backpack checking station you had to go through. Every bathroom break was scrutinized and logged, and only one person was allowed in the bathroom at a time. Small school (my class had 36 kids or so) but it's a great example of one person ruining everything for everybody.
>"A large part of the school's job is to prepare students for work, we want you to be in class on time because if you show up late all the time to work, they're not going to hire you,"
Well they're doing a shitty job of teaching this, because all of the office jobs I've had don't require me to have my ass in a seat, completely awake and ready to work at 7:35 AM, and when you're a teenager going through hormonal changes, that's a huge ask.
Most Europeans have no idea what a "hall monitor" is and teachers don't have such obsessive control over their students use of toilet facilities. The schools I went to were not perfect and yet all students had to do was raise a hand and ask for permission to leave the classroom.
A person walking around the school garbage collecting loose students and returning them to their classrooms. Or potentially sending them to the principal’s office if they are repeat offenders.
At my high school, we had a city police officer doing this. (Not continuously, but she was always around looking to catch students breaking the law.)
Of course this officer was fully armed with a pistol, taser, and pepper spray.
Where I grew up these were called "School Resource Officers" and their presence was inscrutable. Ours coached the girl's volleyball team, had his own small office, and seemingly did nothing else for virtually all four years I was there.
He was there to quickly call for police presence when once a large fight broke out, but that was about it.
It works in some cultures. But in an increasing number of places in the US, the worst of the students abusing their time in the halls are bullies and/or violent. The students who are most likely to follow the instructions of a student hall monitor are most likely not the worst offenders.
The hall monitor simply keeps track of who is breaking the rules. Presumably, that's all the cop does. They're not perp-walking them to jail or something, right?
Students don't have any disciplinary authority over other students, nor any ability to immediately intervene when appropriate, which paraprofessionals and SROs do.
And SROs absolutely do escalate to the criminal justice system (e.g. juvenile detention) when necessary. There are occasionally guns, knives, drugs, and violence in schools, and those are situations where the legal system is frequently involved.
The bottom line is that a student hall monitor is going to be able to snitch on an otherwise good kid who is goofing off in the hall, but they're not going to be able to deal with more serious issues. And it would be a very bad idea to rely on them as the front-line workers for more serious issues.
Yeah its very much a US thing. I remember some visiting US students that got insulted because I just got up and went to the bathroom mid seminar. The episode even got brought up during course evaluation, and the local professor was confused what the issue was.
If this is a Socratic question, well, you know the answer.
If it's in good faith, yes, certainly. Every privilege is abused sometimes. I fully expect to break the speed limit on the way to work today, because my car doesn't have a governor installed. Turn me in, I beg you.
To address what I perceive as the issue you raise, so what? If someone needs to hit the head (nausea, diarrhea, something) they need to go. If an act of elimination takes longer than what some uptight school administrator decides is necessary, so what? We as a society tolerate some small abuse so that everything else functions well.
The existence of hall monitors doesn't require students to pee on the floor. I think you're trying to make a dichotomy out of something that isn't one.
Using the restroom isn't a privilege, but being able to wander the halls unsupervised is.
Yeah. In lower grades in Germany you'd raise a hand or just get up and leave, depending on the policy of your teacher. As students turn 16-18 nobody cares about where they go anymore. At that point school becomes optional and students are there because they want to, not because they have to. Controlling their bathroom breaks would be ridiculous.
At university level nobody is checking attendance anyways. You go to classes/lectures if you think you need them. There's no points awarded for the mere fact that you showed up or for anything occurring in the course of them. Here controlling bathroom breaks would be beyond farcical.
The message that "even your body belongs to the Authority and you must be complicit in disciplining it to our convenience" is very powerful. Gotta get that pounded down into kids when they're too young to effectively resist or question.
School administrators are awful because modern American school parents are god awful and want stupid things. Several states are attempting to bring back physical violence as a behavior modification tool because way too many of our fellow citizens genuinely believe that "spare the rod, spoil the child" is a literal, scientific fact. So many people genuinely believe the correct way to handle bad child behavior is to hit them.
It's funny, because out of the tens of thousands of students my mom taught over 30 years, the students that misbehaved pretty regularly came from parents that enthusiastically punished their child with violence.Those kids always loved her though, because she was firm and strict but also very maternal. She regularly had kids that everyone else considered "bad students" or "trouble kids" behave, and actually LEARN things (and she taught french class FFS), to the point that those troublesome kids would often beg to come spend their study hall periods in her classroom and actually behave and do their homework.
There are a lot of shitty human beings in the American school system, because we pay garbage, so you don't become a teacher unless you have some ulterior motive. For many idealistic young people, they want to teach, but that gets metaphorically beaten out of them by petty administrative politics and dealing with all the shitty people who got the job by default because nobody else wants it and they just want to be a shithead to kids.
I shouldn't have to say this but not every physically abused kid will act out, and not every one will act out in the same way. Plenty of those kids were just desperate for someone to pay attention to them. Because we are social animals, and the people that think we should beat our kids are pretty bad at knowing that.
I don't understand the concept of "losing bathroom privileges" like... ok? So should I just shit at my desk? It's not a privilege it's a bodily function you can't "take away" someone's ability to go to the bathroom just their ability to do so in a place that is private and purpose built for it.
Learning isn't all fun. Everyone thinks they can make learning fun, but it's always a combination of things that are very specific to the person suggesting it ('Actually making everything Thomas the Tank Engine themed is magic and works very well!') or just wistful thinking ('If the teacher didn't tell me to work I would have been more motivated!'). And most of the more valid research suggests more conservative approaches work pretty well.
Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun, without paying them or offering any real incentives (other than grades, which only count in the last year), so they need to make sure kids don't have excuses to shirk.
So to ensure students can use a bathroom if they really need to, but aren't abusing it to just take a break every class (missing maybe 25% of their class time? Say 15 minutes per hour class) you'd agree to something like an app to track it?
No not at all. The idea is absurd. Even entertaining that it could be a solution is suspect. If students leave class too much they are marked as absent. It works many other places in the world, without having to do some creepy surveillance of kids bodily functions.
We used to use a piece of paper called an "attendance sheet", with ruled lines on it. You can think of it as an excel-like app, with touchscreen stylus functionality and good battery life.
Not a teacher, but yes. The very same app that teachers use for grading, is my guess. The teacher does the attendance tracking. The app just records what the teacher puts into it. The teacher is free to take notes of when people leave and enter. If most of the class time has the students seated then a student walking around likely is very eyecatching. (What do blind teachers do? Roll call + the honor system is my first guess. Maybe handing out bathroom passes manually would be a viable Plan B.)
I'd never agree. What happens if I need more than 15 minutes? Will I be deemed a bad student because I simply need more time to do my business? What does this have to do with how I learn?
How about you can use the bathroom when you need to, and if you actually find instances of students not using the bathroom, cutting class, etc. you address it by punishing those students. Give them detention. Make them have a chaperone at random times. Suspend them. Punish the behavior you want to regulate (lying about using the bathroom to goof off) and don't try to regulate unrelated and uncontrollable bodily functions.
good point. lets get some bids on the "shit tracking app", pay for a seat for every student and then make sure we further stretch the teachers by giving them a special admin seat in said "shit tracking app" and making sure they punish over-shitters
Students also have trouble using the restroom when the facilities are inoperable due to vandalism. There's not really a good solution. What is necessary is more staffing, but there is not enough labor available at the rates school districts are able to pay.
If the students goofing off in the hall are willing to listen to the nerds who are hall monitors, then that school doesn't really have too much of an issue with delinquent students in the halls.
Do you really think other students are best equipped to deal with students having sex, doing drugs, or devious licks in the bathrooms?
And in any case, the hall monitors are probably better off in class instead of being unpaid labor.
Those mostly seem like imagined problems. They're trivially addressed - as evidenced by having hall monitors confidently deployed from one generation of school administration to the next.
Given the way schools districts are drawn in the US, it highly depends on the locale. Pick any random school in Loudoun County VA and the halls will probably look quite a bit different than some random school in Mobile County AL.
I think if I squint and turn my head a bit I can almost maybe see a semblance of a point to what you're trying to say.... but it doesn't really hold up for me at all.
Learning isn't fun doesn't really relate to the fact that bodily functions exist. If a kid is well but going to the restroom for 30 minutes every class period and on their phone etc just skipping.... I guess punish that as if it were skipping? You can't just assume negative intent across the entire student body when it comes to checks notes pooping in a toilet like a person?
So instead of a consistent system, teachers randomly punish kids for going to the bathroom if the teacher feels like the kid might be on their phone based on whether it seems to frequent?
You mean like how our law enforcement works currently? Should the government all put trackers on our vehicles instead? It will consistently prevent things much worse than some students skipping class to go to the bathroom, like hit-and-runs.
ummmmmmm I mean I guess you could at least try not caring how often a kid is relieving themselves.... you could absolutely make basic bodily functions into a "beat the clock" with a side of a consequences if you'd like though. I'd encourage you to run for your local school board if you feel passionately about this cause.
> Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun
No. That is not the function of schools!
Kids are full of energy and interest. A good teacher, combined with a well-designed syllabus and a good teaching plan, will then engage the kids. Of course, the lessons have to match the students' abilities.
A HUGE mistake is to compel students to do work that they haven't learned how to do. This mistake was inflicted on me by my maths teacher at a good private school - nominally a very good maths teacher, author or contributor to a number of school maths textbooks. I routinely had my homework returned as "wrong", but I wasn't taught how to do it right. As a consequence, I suffered a 5-year-long mental block in maths.
It sounds like Fresno schools are being run by concentration-camp commandants.
[Edit] OK, so some kids aren't wide-eyed and keen to engage, whether because of earlier school experiences or because of other experiences. Why compel those kids to go to school at all? You can't force kids to study (no, not even with apps!), so why force them to go to school?
I think that at least here in the UK, it's to do with keeping a lid on the numbers of unemployed; and with relieving working parents of childcare duties, so they can do jobs to pay their taxes.
If school's about compelling students to do what they don't want to do, then obviously schools have to engage in coercive measures, like tracking apps and metal detectors. But why stop there? Why not go ahead and shackle them to their desks?
Many US schools already have 20ft-high fences around them, like prisons. How is being imprisoned conducive to learning?
Am I downvoted because people really think students are feral monsters, that need to be locked up whether they're learning or not? Is it possible that imprisoning schoolkids makes them more interested in escaping than learning? What kind of parent would send their kids to prison?
Long ago in 8th-grade shop class I wasn't feeling well and asked the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. He said no. Right then I projectile vomited all over him and his desk. All he said was "Ok, you can go."
Afterward he never refused any request I made for anything.
Guy in my high school class just pissed in a trashcan when he was told no.
The idea that you can do this to students without some biohazard cleanup is absurd. It's also just another way America deals with education issues by dealing with everything but the issue. If the issue is students falling behind, it's not because half of the high school class is going to vape in the bathroom. It's because school starts too damn early, kids don't retain info over the summer, and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
We could deal with those things, but that would mean the sports teams have to practice later, get over the idea that kids don't help their families plant in the summer, and deal with socioeconomic factors, respectively.
I grew up in a rural area. In my late 20s, I went to community college in an suburban area.
The entrance exam was populated with HS grads and me. I was from the final generation with constant access to adult-free + free range hours. Everyone else was in the early wave of kids with locked-down, 24/7 adulted childhoods.
Their education was comparable to mine - in quality, behavior etc (my kids attended their schools).
I was one of a handful that didn't have to start off with remedial classes.
Having gone through school and now being an adult, I know full well that normal kids only need one or two bathroom breaks during the day.
I also know that there was a large group of kids, generally poorer performing students, who used "bathroom break" as a get-out-of-class-for-10-or-20-minutes each period as a freebie that they will always use.
The teachers aren't dumb. They know which kids are abusing the system. And they know these kids will shamelessly look you in the eyes and say "I have to take a shit, I must go to the bathroom" and then go fuck around for 10 or 20 minutes.
sounds like the teachers already know who the bad kids are. Maybe just punish them... tracking every student's bathroom habits is a wild over reaction to a kid skipping chemistry
this really isn't justifying the poo tracking app. sorry but johnny may end up getting away with some bathroom breaks or an administrator is going to have to.... administer
I'll provide a weak counterpoint. Yes, if a student claims in good faith that they need to use the bathroom, there is no excuse for not letting them go. However, expecting students (some of them) to behave in good faith is silly.
Students will often abuse this privilege (assumption of good faith) to go to the bathroom to escape the strict classroom environment, to socialize with their peers, or do whatever they want. The school sees this as a challenge to their authority so they crack down as in TFA.
(Never mind the fact that schools are making a smelly room with toilets and a sink a more attractive place to be than the classroom for some students is itself sickening to the core.)
Edit: I'm not one to complain about downvotes, but this time I don't get it. Am I wrong? These are things I've observed in a variety of schools, and in relatively well-off areas at that. I'd imagine the problems are far more acute in areas of lower socioeconomic status.
What is the deal with school administrators? I've never interacted with a profession that incompetent and self-important. Some, I assume, are good people.
> Fresno High is the latest school in the district to roll out the 5 Star Students app to regulate student trips outside classrooms during instructional periods. Students are limited to two seven-minute bathroom breaks during the day, and the app keeps track of the time they spend outside of classrooms.
I'd sure hate to be a student with IBS having to deal with this system.
> “Today, you know, it’s girls’ menstrual cycles, I went to the bathroom and I came back two minutes late,” she said. “Some teachers are more strict. For example, my math teacher, if we go past a certain amount of time then we just can’t go for the rest of the month.”
Or female. I wonder how much the school district is paying for this app.
Yeah if one wealthy family threatens to sue the school district over emotional distress because their kid has an accident that would have easily been avoided if they could have gone to the bathroom for a third time that day this is going to be all over.
And that's good thing, this is insane helicoptering.
There are have been lawsuits and schools have lost. And people have protested to the school board. People have been fired. School board members have been removed.
These events show up every once in a while in the media.
Yet, these policies are nearly universal. These schools will go right back to doing the same thing after the attention dies down.
Yeah. Not only that, but it just blows my mind how many people in this thread are defending this gestapo-like behavior of controlling and tracking kids bodily functions.
I have a personal anecdote from middle school where we had 4(!!!) minute breaks between classes. A teacher actually refused my entry into class after I was late coming from a PE class on the other side of the school complex.
So you had 4 minutes to use the restroom, change, and walk across the entire school. Some teachers/admins just need a good ole smack to their head.
I bet the school administrators (and to a slightly lesser extent the teachers) love it, it gets them to offload a central part of their job. Now instead of disciplining students when they break rules, they can just offload it to an app and abdicate any responsibility. "Oh the app says you can't use the restroom? Guess you can't use the restroom, sorry!" Big "The Lady from Silicon Valley" vibes.
Impressive how well schools are keeping up with preparing kids for the workplace. Amazon and others track bathroom visits, so it's clearly best to train these kids young to expect no privacy as they take breaks from learning how to be the best possible cog.
This is one of the worst ideas ever. It seems like we love to treat students like they're toddlers until they're 18 then all of a sudden we expect them to act like they're autonomous adults. This isn't how you teach anyone independence.
How does this work if the student declines to carry a mobile device? I own a smartphone so that I can receive SMS authentication codes from people like my bank, who haven't yet grokked that SMS is insecure. But: that phone never leaves my home - I don't carry it around. It isn't a "mobile" phone.
So that's going to be "Excuse me Miss, I can't run the app, because I don't bring a smartphone into class. Now can I please have a pee?"
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801289
As someone who was actually bullied and not heard about it, maybe that's a US thing but to me that never happened in bathrooms and always in the open when teachers were not around.
For me the problem was that most schools are all about memorization and thinking inside the box. Switching to a different type of school solved my issues. (smaller classes, more permissive, exploring problems and their solutions with multiple correct answers rather than simply 'memorize this thing, check the box').
That's a money issue, not a system issue.
At my local HS the answer was to close most of the bathrooms during class time and monitor visits, since putting live cameras in the bathrooms would cause an even larger uproar. Students always had access to a bathroom during class time, just one up near the admin offices that could be more closely observed.
'Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.'
>"A large part of the school's job is to prepare students for work, we want you to be in class on time because if you show up late all the time to work, they're not going to hire you,"
My current job has me getting here at 8 AM.
Most Europeans have no idea what a "hall monitor" is and teachers don't have such obsessive control over their students use of toilet facilities. The schools I went to were not perfect and yet all students had to do was raise a hand and ask for permission to leave the classroom.
At my high school, we had a city police officer doing this. (Not continuously, but she was always around looking to catch students breaking the law.)
Of course this officer was fully armed with a pistol, taser, and pepper spray.
He was there to quickly call for police presence when once a large fight broke out, but that was about it.
They didn’t give the kid proper training, but not a gun, taser or pepper spray.
Seems reckless in hindsight. /s
And SROs absolutely do escalate to the criminal justice system (e.g. juvenile detention) when necessary. There are occasionally guns, knives, drugs, and violence in schools, and those are situations where the legal system is frequently involved.
The bottom line is that a student hall monitor is going to be able to snitch on an otherwise good kid who is goofing off in the hall, but they're not going to be able to deal with more serious issues. And it would be a very bad idea to rely on them as the front-line workers for more serious issues.
If it's in good faith, yes, certainly. Every privilege is abused sometimes. I fully expect to break the speed limit on the way to work today, because my car doesn't have a governor installed. Turn me in, I beg you.
To address what I perceive as the issue you raise, so what? If someone needs to hit the head (nausea, diarrhea, something) they need to go. If an act of elimination takes longer than what some uptight school administrator decides is necessary, so what? We as a society tolerate some small abuse so that everything else functions well.
Or maybe not having pee on their floor is a privilege the school enjoys, one that could be taken away by a student at any time.
The point is that if push comes to shove, the students are going to win this one every time, so it cannot really be a privilege, can it?
Using the restroom isn't a privilege, but being able to wander the halls unsupervised is.
At university level nobody is checking attendance anyways. You go to classes/lectures if you think you need them. There's no points awarded for the mere fact that you showed up or for anything occurring in the course of them. Here controlling bathroom breaks would be beyond farcical.
It's funny, because out of the tens of thousands of students my mom taught over 30 years, the students that misbehaved pretty regularly came from parents that enthusiastically punished their child with violence.Those kids always loved her though, because she was firm and strict but also very maternal. She regularly had kids that everyone else considered "bad students" or "trouble kids" behave, and actually LEARN things (and she taught french class FFS), to the point that those troublesome kids would often beg to come spend their study hall periods in her classroom and actually behave and do their homework.
There are a lot of shitty human beings in the American school system, because we pay garbage, so you don't become a teacher unless you have some ulterior motive. For many idealistic young people, they want to teach, but that gets metaphorically beaten out of them by petty administrative politics and dealing with all the shitty people who got the job by default because nobody else wants it and they just want to be a shithead to kids.
I shouldn't have to say this but not every physically abused kid will act out, and not every one will act out in the same way. Plenty of those kids were just desperate for someone to pay attention to them. Because we are social animals, and the people that think we should beat our kids are pretty bad at knowing that.
Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun, without paying them or offering any real incentives (other than grades, which only count in the last year), so they need to make sure kids don't have excuses to shirk.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-san...
Hall monitors did this for generations.
The majority of US schools report struggling to hire paraprofessionals.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-bad-are-school-staffin...
> That would be the labor I'm referring to.
The generations of hall monitors were students. They're free.
Do you really think other students are best equipped to deal with students having sex, doing drugs, or devious licks in the bathrooms?
And in any case, the hall monitors are probably better off in class instead of being unpaid labor.
Dumb parallel: Some people litter or jaywalk! We could probably address this by implanting GPS trackers in everybody, but... should we?
Learning isn't fun doesn't really relate to the fact that bodily functions exist. If a kid is well but going to the restroom for 30 minutes every class period and on their phone etc just skipping.... I guess punish that as if it were skipping? You can't just assume negative intent across the entire student body when it comes to checks notes pooping in a toilet like a person?
No. That is not the function of schools!
Kids are full of energy and interest. A good teacher, combined with a well-designed syllabus and a good teaching plan, will then engage the kids. Of course, the lessons have to match the students' abilities.
A HUGE mistake is to compel students to do work that they haven't learned how to do. This mistake was inflicted on me by my maths teacher at a good private school - nominally a very good maths teacher, author or contributor to a number of school maths textbooks. I routinely had my homework returned as "wrong", but I wasn't taught how to do it right. As a consequence, I suffered a 5-year-long mental block in maths.
It sounds like Fresno schools are being run by concentration-camp commandants.
[Edit] OK, so some kids aren't wide-eyed and keen to engage, whether because of earlier school experiences or because of other experiences. Why compel those kids to go to school at all? You can't force kids to study (no, not even with apps!), so why force them to go to school?
I think that at least here in the UK, it's to do with keeping a lid on the numbers of unemployed; and with relieving working parents of childcare duties, so they can do jobs to pay their taxes.
If school's about compelling students to do what they don't want to do, then obviously schools have to engage in coercive measures, like tracking apps and metal detectors. But why stop there? Why not go ahead and shackle them to their desks?
Many US schools already have 20ft-high fences around them, like prisons. How is being imprisoned conducive to learning?
Am I downvoted because people really think students are feral monsters, that need to be locked up whether they're learning or not? Is it possible that imprisoning schoolkids makes them more interested in escaping than learning? What kind of parent would send their kids to prison?
Afterward he never refused any request I made for anything.
The idea that you can do this to students without some biohazard cleanup is absurd. It's also just another way America deals with education issues by dealing with everything but the issue. If the issue is students falling behind, it's not because half of the high school class is going to vape in the bathroom. It's because school starts too damn early, kids don't retain info over the summer, and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
We could deal with those things, but that would mean the sports teams have to practice later, get over the idea that kids don't help their families plant in the summer, and deal with socioeconomic factors, respectively.
And that's, like, hard, man.
> If the issue is students falling behind, it's ... because school starts too damn early,
Yes.
> kids don't retain info over the summer,
Yes.
> and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
Yes. Fully compounded by the utter lack of access to brain building, adultless, free range time+area.
source: father of five
The entrance exam was populated with HS grads and me. I was from the final generation with constant access to adult-free + free range hours. Everyone else was in the early wave of kids with locked-down, 24/7 adulted childhoods.
Their education was comparable to mine - in quality, behavior etc (my kids attended their schools).
I was one of a handful that didn't have to start off with remedial classes.
I also know that there was a large group of kids, generally poorer performing students, who used "bathroom break" as a get-out-of-class-for-10-or-20-minutes each period as a freebie that they will always use.
The teachers aren't dumb. They know which kids are abusing the system. And they know these kids will shamelessly look you in the eyes and say "I have to take a shit, I must go to the bathroom" and then go fuck around for 10 or 20 minutes.
Little Johnny's parents say, you are unfairly targeting our child. Allege discrimination.
That is how you get here.
Students will often abuse this privilege (assumption of good faith) to go to the bathroom to escape the strict classroom environment, to socialize with their peers, or do whatever they want. The school sees this as a challenge to their authority so they crack down as in TFA.
(Never mind the fact that schools are making a smelly room with toilets and a sink a more attractive place to be than the classroom for some students is itself sickening to the core.)
Edit: I'm not one to complain about downvotes, but this time I don't get it. Am I wrong? These are things I've observed in a variety of schools, and in relatively well-off areas at that. I'd imagine the problems are far more acute in areas of lower socioeconomic status.
> Fresno High is the latest school in the district to roll out the 5 Star Students app to regulate student trips outside classrooms during instructional periods. Students are limited to two seven-minute bathroom breaks during the day, and the app keeps track of the time they spend outside of classrooms.
I'd sure hate to be a student with IBS having to deal with this system.
> “Today, you know, it’s girls’ menstrual cycles, I went to the bathroom and I came back two minutes late,” she said. “Some teachers are more strict. For example, my math teacher, if we go past a certain amount of time then we just can’t go for the rest of the month.”
Or female. I wonder how much the school district is paying for this app.
And that's good thing, this is insane helicoptering.
These events show up every once in a while in the media.
Yet, these policies are nearly universal. These schools will go right back to doing the same thing after the attention dies down.
I have a personal anecdote from middle school where we had 4(!!!) minute breaks between classes. A teacher actually refused my entry into class after I was late coming from a PE class on the other side of the school complex.
So you had 4 minutes to use the restroom, change, and walk across the entire school. Some teachers/admins just need a good ole smack to their head.
It seems like "some people love it" would be the MUCH more interesting (if not disturbing) story.
So that's going to be "Excuse me Miss, I can't run the app, because I don't bring a smartphone into class. Now can I please have a pee?"