Students are able to access the Minga website on their Chromebooks in order create their hall pass or check their student ID. Photo by: Emily Nguyen

VHS will phase out physical hall passes in favor of a digital system

Minga is a campus management platform focused on ensuring campus safety and student behavior. According to the company’s website, their mission is to “empower students to excel, by creating an environment where they feel secure and actively involved in their campus community.” The platform offers several products relating to campus management such as tardy management, a check-in module and namely, digital hall passes. 

 The digital hall pass system has already been implemented at VHS. Pilot teachers testing the program include Linda Bergfeld, Preston Biller and Jared Honda. Minga’s digital hall pass system is slowly replacing the green paper passes as a means to make the process easier and help school staff keep students accountable. 

Bergfeld said, “I could not be happier. It takes the management of the hall pass away from interrupting the class and the teacher having to be distracted and deal with the student to the student taking ownership, creating their own pass [and] walking out the door. Everything is managed outside the classroom. It frees us up to let young adults be young adults and take care of their business, if you will.”

The product has many features that physical passes are not able to provide, such as providing teachers and staff a detailed report on a student’s hall pass usage and the elapsed time that a student has been gone from the class. Teachers can also place daily limits on hall passes, including when passes can be used, how many passes a students can create and when they expire. Using this system, teachers will also be able to create “no party” groups, preventing certain students from being out of class at the same time to prevent meet-ups.

To use Minga, students must log in using their school Google account. After their login, students have the option to make a pass under the “student tools” button. Upon creating the pass, a student must select where they are heading to, although their options only include various restrooms and a water fountain. Students may only create passes that last for five minutes before expiring. However, teachers are able to assign passes to students for other locations, such as the health office. Teachers can also extend the hall pass’s time limit.

Rebecca Castro ‘25 said, “I think Minga is a terrible alternative to physical passes. Although it can hold a student accountable, [students in the] ‘no party’ groups could [have to] coincidentally go to the bathroom at the same time but won’t be able to.”

Minga’s dashboard auto-updates in real-time and allows staff members to look up a student’s name, email or ID number in order to verify the validity of their pass and reason for being outside of class.  The dashboard also shows whether or not a student’s pass has expired and it can keep an unlimited history of a student’s usage of passes so that staff may know if a student is considered a past abuser of hallway passes. 

Castro said, “I think that because it enforces many regulations on something that almost all students do everyday at school, students will feel outraged causing tension between the students and the school executives.”

Bergfeld said, “We will be fully digital as soon as I can make it happen.”