5-star, Attendance Program, Generates Mixed Feelings

Let's talk about 5-Star. It's a new program that was introduced to John F. Kennedy High School at the beginning of the 2024-25 school year that allows students to use digital hall passes rather than signing out on a sheet of paper and bringing a physical hall pass with them whenever they leave class. Each student gets two bathroom passes per day and a seven minute timer for each pass they use. 5-Star also grants us other useful features such as the new tardy procedure where students who are late to class have to enter their ID numbers into a Chromebook at the front office and again when they get to class. 

This helps our school keep track of the amount of tardy students there are everyday. To start, digitizing our hall pass system comes with many upsides, including the quick and easy sign out system where students have to enter their ID number into the designated 5-Star Chromebook in their class and that is logged into 5-Star in “kiosk mode” which they will use to then enter their ID number again when they return. The seven minute timer also allows the school’s administrators to see how long you’ve been out, and if a student is out for over seven minutes they can call the student’s class to check if they have come back yet, and if not they can send someone out to go look for them.  The timer is especially important during emergencies such as fire drills or earthquakes, if a student were to go to the bathroom right before an emergency, a traditional hall pass wouldn’t be able to alert the staff of their whereabouts, whereas digital hall passes can let them know whether or not a student had left class before the emergency or not. When asked about the advantages of using 5-Star, Kimberly Martin (Assistant Principal) explained,  “It also makes it a little bit easier for when we have substitutes, because we used to have a campus supervisor escort students to the bathroom if they had a sub.” 

Another reason why 5-Star could be seen as an improvement from regular hall passes is that they are digital—meaning that students won’t have to carry around a hall pass to the bathroom and possibly contaminate it with germs from the restroom that could potentially get spread around to other students. 

According to the article “Germaphobia and OCD in the age of COVID” by the Health News Team at Sharp Health this increasing fear of the spread of bacteria has largely become a serious problem after the pandemic, since which most people have become quite concerned about germs and bacteria. 

They state, “The possibility of contracting the coronavirus sensitized many people — who previously did not think much about germs — to the dangers of microscopic troublemakers.” 

There are many advantages that come with using 5-Star but there are also some disadvantages. These drawbacks include numerous problems, for instance the seven minute timer.  The list of pros and cons in our school’s use of 5-Star continues. There is still one more important thing to take into consideration; the opinions of the people that this new system affects. 

“The 12 people limit does nothing to stop students from leaving their classes,” says Alisha Manke (10). “So many kids just leave class anyway without using 5-Star.” 

Her friend, Kiranpreet Kaur (10) adds that, “A limit of 12 students in a school of over a thousand isn’t very proportionate.”

 When asked about the 12 student limit, Martin (Assistant Principal) says, "The way we came up with that number was mostly based on how many bathroom stalls there are on campus.” She further explains the numbers, saying, “There was probably going to be more than six people on the 100 side, not more than 6 on the 300 side. Based on the amount of stalls, that's where we got our number.”

Many people have mixed feelings about our new hall pass system, preferring one over the other. But they should all know that 5-Star is here to stay and according to Martin there are still going to be some new changes coming up this year with 5-Star.