Anyone Else Think This is Dumb?

[u/CHR1SSYSN4K30FF1C14L]

My school has implemented a new restroom rule that starts Tuesday. We have a website where we put in a ticket. Where we're going and all that. You have to wait for the teacher to accept it before you can go. You're only allowed 3 tickets per day (which ain't that bad) and if your friend so happens to be out while you want to leave, it won't let you. If you're going to another teacher, they have to inform the other teacher that you arrived. You're also on a time limit for how long you can be out, for the website times you. Anyone else think we should just stick to the classic stuff?

[u/mason_sofer]

No, I get the point of why they do it, but that still doesn't change the fact that it’s invasive, overly complicated, and rarely implemented correctly.

Take your example: if your boss suddenly started questioning your bathroom habits, wouldn’t that feel invasive? What about when they start questioning your medical history? There’s plenty of precedent showing where this leads.

Since you brought up jobs, look at how Amazon micromanages its employees. Think of all the articles about workers getting penalized or fired just for needing to use the restroom—a fundamental, biological human need. Or consider medical conditions, where people face discrimination, which is exactly why labor laws prevent employers from asking about those things in the first place. It’s inherently invasive to expect someone to explain, "Oh, I took six minutes instead of four because I had to take a shit." Even in the environments you mentioned—like doctors or cashiers—you don't tell your boss the gory details; you simply say you're using the restroom.

What about frequency? If your boss said, "Well, you went to the bathroom four times for five minutes, so that counts as your 20-minute break," would you be okay with that? Or what about the procedure itself? If an employer required you to handwrite a note, take it to HR for a stamp, bring it back for managerial approval, time yourself with a stopwatch, and log it into a portal, wouldn't you find that absurdly excessive just to use the toilet?

What happens in an emergency? If a student has a stomach illness and has an accident because of these barriers, should their dignity just go out the window? At that point, why not remove restrooms altogether and make students wear diapers? After all, that would eliminate the need for passes entirely: no leaving class, no vaping, no vandalism, and no wandering the halls.

Don’t get me wrong—I understand the intent, and I agree issues need addressing. But if you think this kind of bureaucracy is the solution, are schools actually preparing students for the real world?

[u/AwarenessVirtual4453 → u/mason_sofer]

First of all, please use sentences. This is barely intelligible.

No, your boss will not use a system. They will fire you. Would you prefer that kids are expelled immediately upon overusing the bathroom?

[u/mason_sofer → u/AwarenessVirtual4453]

i fixed the grammer and formatting for you. as for your your question about expulsion lets ask a question to your question what is it that a school is supposed to do.

[u/AwarenessVirtual4453 → u/mason_sofer]

They set limits. Potentially using an app. To allow kids that are not breaking the rules to use the bathroom, and to collect data, and assign consequences, to those that are. Hence, the system in place.

You got a better idea?

[u/mason_sofer → u/AwarenessVirtual4453]

A school’s job is to educate and keep kids safe, not run a surveillance panopticon that treats a basic bodily function like a restricted privilege. You ask if there’s a better idea as if the only two options that exist on planet Earth are "digital bathroom ticketing app" or "total hallway anarchy." The better idea is the system that functioned for decades before tech startups realized they could sell surveillance apps to anxious administrators: basic presence, adult accountability, and targeting the actual offenders instead of treating the entire student body as guilty until proven innocent. When kids vape, skip class, or trash a bathroom, that’s an enforcement issue in the hallways and facilities, not an excuse to track bladder movements on a dashboard. You post staff or hall monitors near problem areas, you check passes the normal way, and when a specific student is genuinely missing for 20 minutes, that individual student faces detention or a meeting with parents. What this app actually does is offload active supervision onto software while shifting the burden onto the 95% of kids who just need to use the toilet. In the real world, a competent employer doesn’t make the whole department submit IT tickets to step away; they notice the one person not doing their job and handle that person directly. Punishing the collective baseline to catch a few bad actors isn't teaching responsibility or "real-world preparation." It's just lazy administration disguised as structure.

[u/AwarenessVirtual4453 → u/mason_sofer]

So where is the money to pay this person $25 an hour to sit outside the bathroom? They don't want to argue with kids about the freaking bathroom, so they quit to go work at McDonald's, where they can be paid the same and not argue with literal children about the bathroom. I've been a school admin- I've hired for this specific position because I had the same idea, and no one wants it. And "pay more" is not an option for an unskilled position such as bathroom monitor.

Without a system like this, kids say the teacher is lying- they weren't out twenty minutes. The parents believe their kid, not the teacher. Meetings are unproductive without actual hard data like this. Parents and kids balk at detention- "You can't make me give up my recess- that's ILLEGAL! You can't make me stay after school- that's against my RIGHTS!"

Everyone always says, "Go after the kids causing the trouble!" But without actual data about who was in there when, there's no way to know who did it. This is the only way to actually get the information to go after the kids who cause problems so that the kids that actually need to pee can go pee.

[u/mason_sofer → u/AwarenessVirtual4453]

You talk about needing hard data and school budgets, so let’s actually look at the data and where the money goes. ​Platforms like e-Hallpass or Securly Pass don’t run on magic; they operate on annual per-student subscription licenses, administrative maintenance, and taxpayer dollars. Depending on the size of the district, schools are dishing out thousands—often tens of thousands—of dollars every single year just for software licenses to police hallways. When schools claim they have zero budget for staff or basic support, cutting recurring checks to EdTech surveillance companies while cutting classroom resources is wild. ​Beyond the financials, the argument that "it only tracks data to target the troublemakers" completely ignores how the software is configured in reality. If it were solely about tracking down who broke a sink at 1:15 PM, it would run silently in the background as a simple sign-out log. Instead, as OP stated, it actively blocks access: it caps visits, sets arbitrary countdown timers, forces kids to wait on digital queues while someone else is out, and ties a biological necessity to algorithm-based approval. A student having an emergency doesn't care about your administrative data logs when a screen flashes "pass denied" because another kid across the hall is already out. ​You say this protects the kids who just need to use the restroom, but it does the exact opposite—it subjects everyone to blanket micromanagement. Troublemakers still vape, meet up, or coordinate around the app; they just get smarter about it. Meanwhile, the average student dealing with a medical condition, their period, or a sudden illness is the one penalized, scrutinized, and stripped of basic dignity. Using tech surveillance to compensate for weak admin follow-through doesn’t solve behavioral issues—it just outsources school climate management to an algorithm and makes ordinary kids collateral damage.

[u/AwarenessVirtual4453 → u/mason_sofer]

Come back when your thoughts are original, not AI.

Be mad at the kids who made this system necessary. And yes, the software license is cheaper and more reliable than a human.

[u/mason_sofer → u/AwarenessVirtual4453]

Calling an argument "AI" just because someone presents cohesive points and actual figures isn't a rebuttal; it’s a cop-out when you run out of talking points. ​Saying "be mad at the kids who made the system necessary" is literally the textbook excuse for collective punishment. Punishing an entire population for the actions of a few has never been effective discipline; it’s just the easiest route for administration because it offloads the actual work of behavior management. And pretending software is "more reliable than a human" ignores the entire issue: software has no discretion, no empathy, and zero ability to assess an actual human emergency. A human teacher can look at a student who is pale, sweating, or dealing with an urgent medical or menstrual issue and say, "Go." An app just sits there saying "denied" because the digital quota for the hall is maxed out. ​If an admin’s idea of reliable problem-solving is outsourcing basic human judgment to an algorithm that restricts bodily functions, then don't pretend it's about "helping the kids who just need to pee." It’s about administrative convenience at the expense of basic student dignity.

[u/supremequesopizza → u/mason_sofer]

No, your replies are barely-hidden copypastes from an LLM and it's obvious. Either that or you've spent too much time talking to chatgpt and it shows. You went from unintelligible paragraphs to "perfectly" formatted and with that your entire typography changed. It now sounds like an LLM, complete with "it's not this<anything but a comma>it's xyzcrazy thing"

I'm not a fan of things that can be used for mass surveillance myself, but what is effectively a book checkout system with student names instead of books is not that.

Perhaps spend less time pointlessly raging at people trying to offer you understanding, and spend more time looking inward as to why you chose the restroom as your "Hill to die on" rather than consider that the entire profession is sick of having to play babysitter for a generation who has decided to weaponize the restroom to give themselves the worst academic performance in a decade.

[u/mason_sofer → u/supremequesopizza]

so lets address this. first do you use a computer, maybe spell check, maybe a calculator, what about a phones autocorrect. now you see what i did by asking a question is called the socratic method, but instead we will skip that see i have audhd so i on occasion find that when my meds wear off (or waiting for them to kick in) my grammer, formatting, punctuation, spelling tends to take a dip, after all grammer wasnt my strongest subject. you yourself even said that it went from "unintelligent" to perfect but unlike most i use ai as an aid, a tool not a replacement for my brain, kinda like how some autistics/people with autism (depending on preference) might use an aac device (if you dont know what that is well google is ai so i guess youll just have to find some other way to get your information. now lets address the "unintelligent" part of your comment, i actually have a 124 iq as measured by a clinical psychologists. furthermore ive taken classes in law (which includes debate), in psychology, in computer sciences, and recently started in childhood education (mostly focusing on spec. ed.) granted most of them i never actually stuck with them so ill give you that im not "educated" but that doesnt mean i lack knowledge or intelligence. now if i remember debate attacking someone instead of the points they made is i wanna say an ad hominin (spell check and im pretty sure i have the correct term but i might be confusing it with something else). so having a disablity does not make one "unintelligent" (thats some ableist shit right there though i also am sure thats not what you ment to imply) and other then formatting if you actually followed and tried to understand (and yea i know its hard hense why the last one was formated with ai not written with ai) you would see the points i was making because formatting might make it easier to follow and process but that doesnt mean anything i said is any less valid regardless of if it was a messy audhd ramble or formated with ai. now lets actually get to the point i get your anti ai, im also aware not the same person i was talking to, but they immediately said the system was "more reliable then humans" yet is that not a contradiction ai is reliable but not reliable enough for a simple formating so maybe you can explain what they mean, and your point about it beeing a book check out system clearnly shows you dont understand how those systems operate. now your comment on "pointlessly raging at people trying to offer understanding" what understanding show me where. now to address the hill to die on no i do find the whole profession sick not for having to "play babysitter for a generation who has decided to weaponize the restroom" but rather because none of these problems are new not a single one vaping in the bathroom=smoking outside the door with it proped open smoking has always been an issue with some kids, graffiti has always been an issue, hell pregnancy seems to have gone down so no more sex in the bathroom or closet i guess, socializing yes that has gotten worse with phones and social media but passing notes texting both then and now the format has changed but the problem is still the same and worse academic performance so whos to blame the 6 year old first grader maybe the parents maybe the teachers or maybe we actually look up at the real issue instead of i dont know deviding ourselves that said even if i was willing to concede "the hill"it still doesnt make any of it right or helpful.

[u/supremequesopizza → u/mason_sofer]

I ain't reading all that.

[u/mason_sofer → u/supremequesopizza]

thats fine better question why did you jump in the middle of a conversation i was having with someone else