Peculiar Passes
Different bathroom passes on BVH campus
Senior Benjamin Romero walks to the bathroom during fifth period with the bathroom pass for Autoshop. The pass is a blue hubcap provided by Autoshop teacher Jose Levya.
April 17, 2022
Toilet seats, tire rims, wood planks and more are found in the hands of students throughout the Bonita Vista High (BVH) campus. While this may appear to be an exceptional occurrence, it is not uncommon for teachers to have bathroom passes that differ from the standard black plastic ones issued by the BVH administration. For many teachers, this is due to their school-issued bathroom pass being stolen by students, lost or broken.
“[Students] go to the bathroom and they forget [the bathroom pass]. Then someone else would take it for whatever reason,” Spanish 3-4 teacher Lino Vargas said. “That’s what happens to a lot of passes around here, [BVH] kids will take them, go to the bathroom, leave them there and then come back and they’re gone.”
Vargas’ bathroom pass for students this school year is a clock. He mentioned that his clock pass has yet to be lost or broken. From his knowledge, his students like the pass and have not commented much on its difference from the usual black plastic passes.
“We keep losing the regular [bathroom pass] which is a little plastic one that [students] drop and it breaks, so I figured to get something that they could carry around. They only get to use the pass one [at a] time and then someone else gets to use it after that,” Vargas said. I’ve googled funny bathroom [and] hall passes and there are blogs out there [with] pictures of teachers using ridiculous, funny and huge passes that are comical so that it doesn’t get stolen. — World History and Peer Mediation Instructor Laura Lowery
World History and Peer Mediation Instructor Laura Lowery, agrees with Vargas’ restroom policy regarding a single student using the pass for the restroom. This is in consequence of an incident with Lowrey allowing two of her students to go out at the same time. She added that the incident occurred prior to her teaching at BVH and consisted of two students who were friends and appeared to desperately need the restroom.
“[The students] insisted that it was an emergency and a few minutes later the fire alarms in the whole school [San Diego Unified] went off and we all had to get evacuated because of [the two students] suspicious activities,” Lowery said.
Filipino 1-2, Filipino 3-4, and Photography teacher Edwin Lim has a spray bottle as his pass for comedic purposes. His original bathroom pass was stolen during the time he contracted COVID-19 and was out from school for seven days. He noted that having the spray bottle as his bathroom pass is easier to replace. In addition, he has found that his bathroom pass has given students a ‘smile’ if they understood his type of humor.
“My rationale for having this as a bathroom pass was because it’s large, it’s funny, and should be annoying enough for the kids to want to bring it back [to class],” Lim said.
Not all teachers were given the black pass and as a result, had to come up with innovative substitutes. Autoshop teacher Jose Levya reported never receiving a school-issued pass and has been using a blue hubcap painted by one of his students as an alternative.
“I think it’s a bit harder to lose this [hubcap] pass because it’s bigger and it’s all flaked out. It looks like a little low rider wheel so it’s pretty easy to recognize. The one time it did get lost, it got brought back to me pretty quickly because it’s so recognizable,” Levya said.
Levya ensures that his pass is not stolen or lost. He creates a system and declares that when a student loses the pass, he will replace it with something larger. Levya shares a case where a student had “lost” the previous pass, thus Levya decided to create a pass the size of a golf cart tire.
“They [students] threw [the] pass up into my storage area and didn’t tell me because they wanted me to use something else, so that’s when I used the golf cart tire,” Levya said.
There are many instances in which professors purchase items such as lanyards and printed hall permits but they end up stolen since they are so common and easily disguised as everyday items. Lowey, for example, purchased five lanyards with the words “hall pass” and “bathroom pass” on them and in the end she only got two returned. Lowrey explained that the variety of hall passes isn’t limited to the BVH campus and occurs globally.
“I’ve googled funny bathroom [and] hall passes and there are blogs out there [with] pictures of teachers using ridiculous, funny and huge passes that are comical so that it doesn’t get stolen,” Lowery said.
It is often found that bathroom passes differentiate among schools and do not only restrict to the standard black plastic passes. Vargas underlined the need for teachers to provide passes that prevent students from wandering around campus during the class period. Furthermore, limit the number of pupils who leave the classroom to use the restroom.
“We need to have more teachers issuing passes whether it’s their own pass that they have made up or one of the schools that they could go pick up at the office for their classroom,” Vargas said. “Also, only letting out one student at a time. Some teachers let three, four, five students out at the same time and they don’t come back. They just wander around campus. At least with my pass the next person waiting in line always knows who is going to use the bathroom next.”
Loading ...
