Implementing a digital hall pass solution is a game changer for school administrative teams. Those who’ve already done so are reaping the rewards, including significant improvements in safety, behavior, accountability, attendance, and overall school climate.

Because the benefits of digital hall pass solutions over traditional paper hall pass solutions are impossible to ignore, making the decision to switch is the easy part. But deciding on the best digital hall pass for your school may prove more challenging.

When evaluating your options, you’ll find that most digital hall passes offer the same basic functionality. So how do you make the right choice for your school?

Here are some lesser-known features that you may not realize you need, but that will ensure you get the maximum value from your digital hall pass of choice.

1 | Tardy Management & Automated Consequences

Tardiness is disruptive to the classroom, as well as detrimental to student learning. When your digital hall pass solution offers tardy management, you can easily track and manage lateness while saving administrative time. You also gain visibility into tardiness trends at both the school- and student level. With this data at your fingertips, you can more easily investigate and address the underlying causes of late arrivals.

With Securly Pass, you don’t just get these tardy management capabilities, you can also define and automate consequences. This saves additional time, while ensuring consistent enforcement of your school’s attendance policies. When consequences are clear and consistent, the by-product is better attendance and more student accountability.

2 | Visitor Management

School safety isn’t just about accounting for students. You need to ensure that every visitor is accounted for, too. When your digital hall pass can do both, you can be confident that you’re taking the necessary measures to keep your campus safe.

With Securly Pass, you gain invaluable visitor management tools that help maintain a safe and secure environment. You can streamline and formalize visitor check-in, including automatically conducting offender background checks and validating the identities of school visitors. You can also verify the identities of visitors who are picking up students so you can be confident your students are being released only to authorized adults.

3 | Confirmation of Student Arrival

Some digital hall passes operate on a countdown timer and time out after the designated period. But that approach fails to provide confirmation that a student has actually reached their destination or returned to class.

Securly Pass starts at 0:00 and counts up. The pass remains active until the student’s arrival is confirmed by an authorized user (e.g. the nurse confirms that the student arrived at their office or the teacher confirms the student returned to their classroom).

This feature provides confirmation that the student is where they’re supposed to be. It also makes it possible to see how long a hall pass has been active and set alerts when passes have been in use beyond a specified time. Recording this data helps you know how much time students are really spending out of class. It also encourages students to get where they’re going swiftly, instead of spending extra time wandering the halls.

4 | Enhanced Data Privacy

You should hold your education technology providers to the most stringent requirements for data security and privacy. Your digital hall pass provider is no exception. At the least, your provider must be able to demonstrate compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Rule (COPPA), the California Student Privacy Agreement (CSPA), and all other applicable state-level data privacy laws.

Taking student data privacy and security a step further, Securly is the only K-12 student safety and wellness technology provider to attain SOC 2 Type 2 Certification for its suite of solutions, not just the data centers it uses. Securly Pass further ensures data privacy with its “Pass Transparency” feature, which allows schools to keep future pass and ended pass information hidden from adults not involved with the pass.

5 | Teacher Controls

When you’re first starting out with a digital hall pass, you’re just happy to finally have more visibility and control over student movement. But as you, your staff, and your students become proficient using the system, you’ll appreciate having a digital hall pass that gives you the flexibility to customize it for your needs.

For example, Securly Pass lets your teachers determine how they want to manage pass requests and arrivals on a class-by-class basis. Teachers can maintain control over issuing passes and confirming arrivals, or they can elect to let students check themselves in and out of class.

As students demonstrate that they can handle increased responsibility, this feature lets teachers judiciously give them the autonomy to self-check in and out. Granting this ability fosters student accountability and develops deeper trust between teachers and students. Also, regardless of whether students self-check-in or an adult approves the pass, the Pass dashboard ensures that all active passes are visible to staff.

6 | Two-Way Passes

It’s not unusual for a digital hall pass solution to provide the ability for teachers to schedule appointments with students. However, most solutions fail to provide the ability for students to request appointments themselves.

Securly Pass offers two-way passes, which means either a teacher or a student can initiate an appointment request. For teachers, this feature helps them save time by simplifying appointment setting, while also ensuring they’re addressing individual student needs. For students, the ability to request appointments themselves helps them build agency and advocate for their needs.

7 | Integration with Classroom Management Software

Your teachers are juggling enough, so if you can make the tech stuff easier, why wouldn’t you?

Securly Pass’ integration with Securly Classroom does just that. With Securly Classroom, teachers gain powerful classroom management capabilities, including the ability to see and control what their students are doing on their devices during class.

The integration of Securly Pass adds the ability to approve, view, and manage digital hall passes, all in the same user-friendly interface. Teachers don’t need to have a separate application open, meaning they can maintain their focus on teaching.

See Why So Many Schools Choose Securly Pass as their Digital Hall Pass Solution

There’s not just a single reason thousands of K-12 school teams choose Securly Pass to help them ensure a safer, more productive, and more accountable learning environment – there are at least seven!

Want to see everything that’s possible with Securly Pass? Learn more here.

(Or better yet, schedule a no-obligation demo.)