Hall monitor or Big Brother? Fresno teachers, students split on app tracking bathroom trips

At Hoover High School, students’ on-campus life is based on a 5 Star Students app.

To enter a classroom, those who are tardy must scan their digital IDs through the check-in stations to receive an orange “Late Pass” with timestamps. For a bathroom break during class time, students apply for a pass through the app and receive a timer with a six-minute countdown.

To use the library or to see a counselor, teachers assign hall passes to students via the app. Campus safety assistants patrolling throughout the campus check students’ passes to ensure they are at reasonable locations and using the restrooms that are nearest to their classes.

The app also has a reward system. Students earn points by actively engaging in classes, participating in clubs and activities, or doing something positive, such as picking up garbage. In return, a campus safety assistant award points to them through the app. Points can be redeemed at the student store for stickers, candy bars, water bottles, T-shirts, and other school supplies.

“It does help track how often and how long kids were out of the class,” said Hoover High School principal Courtney Curtis. He demonstrated the teachers’ version of the app: A real-time scrolling list displayed 15 students who were out on a Tuesday morning during the first period, among more than 2,000 students. One student was highlighted in red for not going back to class one minute past the six-minute bathroom break limit.

“We started with more, like 20 to 30, sometimes even 40 tardies a day, but this semester, we’ve gotten down to the place where we usually have fewer than 10 (tardies) for the whole day,” said Curtis. “I would just attribute that to the fact of holding kids to high expectations.”

Fresno Unified School District has invested at least $94,000 in the past two school years to implement the 5 Star Students app for all secondary schools, according to the lists of purchase orders approved by the school board. The app was introduced by the district’s safety and security department to reduce tardiness and address challenges with bathroom monitoring and vaping incidents after its success at Tioga and Gaston middle schools in previous years.

“To date, 755 restroom incidents involved drugs and alcohol, 251 involved tobacco and vapor products, 228 involved physical aggression, and 118 involved mutual fighting,” wrote a document in June 2023 from the Office of Superintendent to the board, saying the district is adding vaping sensors, surveillance cameras and the 5 Star Students app to school sites.

Each school is at a different stage of rolling out the program. Some argue that the app is little more than a nanny or hall monitor and could be violating student privacy by timing bathroom breaks and tracking whether students are on or off campus. They also say that it doesn’t address or solve any real educational problems and doesn’t provide resources for those who are struggling to learn. However, Hoover High and some other campuses that enforce the app more thoroughly, disagree strongly, saying the app has become essential for managing the campus and engaging the students since the full potential of the app has been applied after some phase-in period.

“Honestly, last year we were like a college campus,” said Maddalena Perez, a teacher at Hoover High. “I gotta say, I quite like the app, bathroom passes are digital, the nurse is digital, the counselor is digital, so there’s a timestamp, there’s a record, it’s definitely harder for kids to get away with certain things.”

Teachers from different schools told The Bee that they find the app helps cut down on truancy, though students generally dislike it, as The Bee reported about Fresno High’s seven-minute bathroom policy. The effectiveness largely depends on collective efforts to enforce the rules. An Edison High teacher said they tried the app at the beginning of the year, but the execution has not been consistent because the site doesn’t have enough computers. A Sunnyside teacher said the computer in his classroom was down, and he doesn’t have the capacity to deal with bathroom break requests on his laptop.

“The key is the positive reinforcement with the points, and with teachers being at their doors. If they don’t follow that, the system would fall apart,” said Curtis.

At Hoover High, the app works like this. Curtis said teachers wouldn’t let tardy students into the classroom unless they register at one of the four checkpoints and show the teacher their late passes. Stations are set up outside restrooms and campus entrances, and campus safety assistants patrol during class to check on students’ passes. When they see a kid wandering around, they approach and ask to see the student’s countdown clock on their phones or ask the student’s name and student ID. On the managing end of the app, campus safety assistants can click on a student’s profile to view the class schedule and check “whether they’re all the way over in a different zone or restroom where they shouldn’t be,” said Curtis.

During class, when a student files a bathroom request and the app approves, the teacher’s end would receive a notification, said Perez. With her permission, the student inputs the ID number as the code to initiate the timer and reenters the code to stop it when returning to the classroom. If the bathroom passes in use hit the maximum campus-wide, the app would buzz the student and teacher’s interfaces with a message to wait for the next pass released. But the teacher can assign overrun passes to students, in case it’s an emergency, said Perez. The app is fancier than merely timestamp attendance.

“Let’s just say you’re having issues with each other, or you always like to go out at the same time, there’s a system where I can put both of your names in,” said Curtis. “You two tried to scan out at the same time, it will tell that you have to wait, so we don’t have the same groups of students that are always meeting out.”

The app also advances school announcements, showcases club and event schedules, and polls for homecoming and other events.

Over 90% of students carry phones to school, said Curtis. For those who do not possess a phone, the school asks them to print out the digital ID which has a headshot and a scannable barcode. Some classrooms have kiosks for students to sign out for the bathroom. Teachers can also distribute hall passes for various visits via the teachers’ version of the app.

Curtis said there wasn’t a lot of pushback from students, largely because they started the app on the first day of the school year, and the feeder schools for Hoover High, Tioga and Ahwahnee middle schools have also been using the 5 Star Students app so the incoming ninth graders were already familiar with the system. Perez said the highlight of the app is tracking participation, such as rewarding students points for being helpful and going to events.

“We have a whole list of character traits to positively reinforce,” said Perez. Points can be converted to food, school hats, T-shirts, and a lot more items in the student store. “I’ve been teaching high school and middle school for eight years, everyone wants a sticker, even now! Or a Hoover T-shirt, kids totally love it,” she said.

The app isn’t perfect, said Perez, but it provides a paper trail to record students’ behavior, and makes it easier on the administration. In the past, teachers used paper or Excel sheets to record bathroom trips, and occasionally called the campus safety team to look for a student who had been out for too long.

“Bathroom has always been a problem in education, do you let them go or not? I’m not in their bodies, I don’t know what they feel, it’s a very strange thing to be in charge of,” said Perez. “But it’s our responsibility to know where they are, the app has helped to minimize the issues.”

However, some educators argue the app becomes a tool to gather evidence to use against students instead of solving the real problem — helping kids to engage in learning, make wise decisions, and be responsible for their own.

Marisa Rodriguez, a teacher at Roosevelt High School said she often has kids walk to her and apologize for the bathroom break has taken too long because they found the bathroom locked, or some older kids were smoking, or the school shut down the restroom for an investigation on an incident, and the student had to find another bathroom on the other side of the campus. It’s unfair to send these students to lunch detention for they were just trying to find a clean and vacant restroom, said Rodriguez.

Students said only a few high schoolers don’t respect the rules — it’s a common teenager situation and troublemakers don’t care about learning no matter whether the app exists — but forcing the app and the bathroom timer to all students is making everyone to pay for those few students’ misbehaviors.

“It does suck for the ones that don’t do all of that,” said Cirene Cruz, a junior at Fresno High. “Some get punished for what they do, like exceeding the time and ditching the classes, but you can’t assume all of these (apply to all students), and one person does that, everybody gets punished for it.”

“So my question is, what are we doing to empower our teachers and our kids? Because an app is not going to magically force kids to be on time and go to class,” said Rodriguez.

Classroom teachers and even regular students, don’t need an app to recognize who isn’t in the classroom because, unfortunately, those students are always the same group of people, said Rodriguez. They can’t make good decisions for a variety of reasons, and they need extra care and support.

Nonetheless, the app doesn’t build relationships with students. The app wouldn’t tell the reason behind the student missing a class. The app doesn’t provide the resources that the kid needs most. It just makes it easier to find evidence and criminalize behavior, said Rodriguez.

“We use the word ‘Drop-out,’ but I think we should start using the word ‘Push out.’ Haven’t teenagers always exhibited deviant behaviors? But now we’re going to start criminalizing them at higher rates by sitting in the office and running a report with this long list of data to prove why the kids haven’t been doing what they were supposed to be doing,” she said.

“I don’t think you need an app,” she added. “It takes building relationships, maybe having more counselors on our campuses, more social workers or psychologists, but yes, it’s cheaper to implement the app and prove how deviant this kid has been.”