E-Hallpass in the High School Library (Now called Securly) (2024)

A few years ago our school adopted E-Hallpass (which is now called Securly) and I’ve spent some time playing around with it in order to find a work flow that allows it to work well for the needs of a busy and robust high school library. Which wasn’t easy, because its not really built with school library use in mind, it is built specifically with typical classroom pass needs in mind. So Securly works great for common situations like going from your classroom to the nurse, bathroom, or water fountain, but it doesn’t work as well for the more nuanced and varied school library pass needs. I am hoping this will change as more and more schools adopt Securly and they continue to roll out new features and functions.

(So if your school uses Securly please send them improvement requests related to creating better options for library passes! If enough of us request it I think they will adopt a better process, we really need some easy way to create pass limits or advance “sign up” type passes)

In the meantime, though, I have come up with some work arounds that are helpful and which are working for us at our school library, so I thought I’d share them with you. They are rather labor intensive, meaning that they do kind of require that someone be manning the sign-in desk most of the time, but I have worked out a few things to help with that too.

I think that if your library is pretty busy, if you have a lot of students circulating in and out all day for a variety of reasons, then my strategy may be helpful to you. If, however, your library is serving a smaller number of people through the day you might be able to get away with using Securly the same way the classrooms do. We have too much demand for me to do it that way, we had to find a way to utilize limits and to have different types of passes. So here’s what I came up with!

Setting Up Different Types of Library Passes

So the first issue we encountered with Securly was that we really needed to have a couple of different types of passes, because we have different types of library visits happening simultaneously throughout the day, and each different type requires slightly different “rules” and different limitations (in terms of how many we can have at once for a particular purpose).

The solution we found for this is to have several different “locations” set up in Securly, for the library. The way Securly works is that students can create passes to specific teachers but also to specific “locations.” A location can have multiple staff members added to it, so that a pass created to that location will show up on the dashboard to any/all staff assigned to that virtual location. All of this is set up in the admin side of Securly, and it all can be customized for your district.

So, after I decided which types of passes we wanted for the library I was able to let our Securly admin person know and they were able to create the three corresponding “locations” in Securly. Once the locations were created in the backend I was then able to “add” those locations to my dashboard, and to the dashboard for our library assistant. Once that is done I go into my Securly settings and turn off the part where it says “allow students to create passes to you.” The reason I do this is because I do not want students creating passes to me as a person, I want them to only be creating passes to one of the library locations (otherwise it gets too confusing, plus I’m not always physically present in the library, often I am elsewhere in another classroom.)

Once I add the locations to my dashboard they will now show up on my screen when I click the “room capacity” dropdown button. From there I can see which locations are on my profile and I can also easily alter and change the limits for each one, whenever I want. This part is important later in the “logistics” section.

Which Types of Passes/Locations Do We Use?

We needed three different passes/locations for the following situations:

• Study Hall Pass (We named the location/pass “Library-Study Hall)
  • We needed to have a specific pass option that could be used only for study hall visits. We needed to be able to set a specific limit on how many of these we could make available for each period of the day. We needed to be able to easily adjust the limit or turn it off entirely as needed, for example if there was a period that we would not be offering study hall passes.
  • Some day Securly will make my dreams come true and offer a feature that makes setting the limits for certain periods/time frames automatic. I.e. I’d like to be able to set it so that it will automatically allot X number of passes for 1^st period and then not let that number be exceeded during that period and then automatically allot X number of passes for period 2, etc etc). As it currently is I have to automatically add X number at the start of each period and then turn it back to “0” once the limit is reached. Then I have to remember to do that again at the start of every period. Which is not a huge ordeal but it would be incredible to have that part automated in the future.
• Quick Visit Pass (We named the location/pass “Library-Quick Visit”)
  • We needed a separate pass option for what we are calling “quick visit” passes. These are to be used only when students are coming from a credit class in order to achieve some specific, class related purpose. We needed these to have a time cap of about 5-10 minutes because we don’t want students missing too much class time. This is the pass students use when they need to come during class to get a book, or research assistance, or or to use the green screen, or something like that. We needed this pass to be distinct and separate from the study hall pass option because we needed to be able to know when a student could stay the entire period (such as on a study hall) versus when they are needed to return to class in a timely manner.
• Lunch Pass (We named the location/pass “Library-Lunch Pass”)
  • We needed a third pass type for lunch passes, again because we needed to know who was coming during their lunch period versus a class versus a study hall. The reason we needed to keep this separate from study hall is because we do not allow eating in the library, so we keep the number of lunch passes we offer very limited (because we don’t want kids skipping lunch!) This pass option we keep at zero most of the day, and adding about 10 only during each lunch period.

Ok so here is the workflow of how our passes work.

Quick Visit Logistics

We leave the QV passes’ “room capacity” set at 5 or 8 all the time, rarely ever adjusting or switching that one. The only time we would change that would be in rare instances where we are not accepting anyone to the library, either because its closed for some reason, or because we are dealing with some kind of situation. In those instances we turn that room capacity to “0” until we are ready to accept more students. But usually we just leave it at 5 all the time so that kids can nip in whenever they need something. We have these passes set up so that they are “long running passes” which means that after 10 minutes have passed they will turn from green to yellow on the dashboard. This is very helpful to us because we can easily see from our dashboard if there are any students in the library at that moment who we should be sending back to their classroom.

The way “quick visit” passes work is as follows:

1. Student is in their credit classroom
2. Student creates pass request “from Teacher Name” to “Library Quick Visit”
   1. The pass will show up as “white” on their screen, their teacher’s dashboard, and my dashboard because it shows up for anyone involved in the pass (student, “from” location, and “to” location.
3. Student asks classroom teacher to “approve” their pass
4. If teacher approves their pass the teacher clicks “approve” on the teacher dashboard and the pass then turns from “white” to “green” on all of our screens. This is how I know the student is now on their way to me.
5. Student leaves classroom and heads to library
6. Student arrives in library and checks in by telling myself or our library assistant their name
7. Myself or our assistant clicks “arrived” on the dashboard to indicate that student is now in the library
8. The classroom teacher will be able to see, from their dashboard, what time the student arrived in the library
9. The pass stays on all of our screens while the student does what they need to do in the library
10. When the student is ready to return to class we click “returning” on the dashboard
11. When the student returns to their classroom they or their teacher clicks “end”
12. The pass will now disappear from all of our dashboards (but it can be seen again at any time by searching the “ended passes” screen)

Side Note: We actually set up an ipad on the corner of our circulation desk which has our library Securly dashboard signed in so students can do some of the signing in and signing out themselves, so myself and our assistant don’t ALWAYS have to jump back to the dashboard to click “arrived” or “returning” for them. We only use this option when we need to be away from the desk, though, because we found that if we just left it up all the time without oversight many students would not remember (or would choose not) to click “arrived” or “returning.” So for the most part we do need to be present to oversee the signing in and signing out.

Study Hall Pass Logistics

We leave “study hall” passes at “0” most of the time, only briefly changing it at the start of a period and then closing it again as soon as the maximum number of passes we want to offer are claimed. Someday I hope that Securly, will make it possible to set up room limits per period of each day so that I could pre-set things for each individual period, but they don’t have that option yet. They do let you set room limits which works fine for the passes that stay on the screen until the kids go back to their own class, but it does not work well for the times when they are coming to the library for the entire period. The reason why is because when they come to the library for the entire period we click “end/keep” to end their pass, otherwise the dashboard for us and the classroom teacher gets too bloated and confusing. The downside is that once you “end” the pass, the system thinks there is now a new vacancies available and will allow more passes to be created. If we leave out “study hall” room capacity at “20,” for example, then once those 20 kids arrive and we click “end” the system will let another 20 kids create passes, and on and on. So, in order to keep the capacity limited to whatever number we decide we can accommodate each period we have to change the room capacity to “20” or whatever and then as soon as those 20 fill up we then must turn the room capacity for “study hall” back to zero until the next period. It is a little annoying but not too bad, you get used to it.

So here is how our study hall process works:

1. The bell rings to signal a passing period, our study hall room capacity is set at 0
2. Students go directly to their assigned study hall rooms (so their teacher can do attendance)
3. A few minutes after the second bell rings (the one signalling the start of the period) we will change the “study hall” room capacity from “0” to “20” (or however many passes we want to do for that period). Students who want to come to the library for the study hall period must request a study hall pass within the first 5-7 minutes of the period. Once our capacity number is reached (it is always immediate), we close the capacity back to “0” for the rest of the period. Passes are claimed “first come first served” by the students in their study hall period.
4. Students in study hall who want to come will fill out an ehallpass “from study hall teacher name” to “library study hall.” The study hall teacher will “approve” the request if they are ok with the student coming to the library. Approving the request will turn the pass “green.”
5. Once student has a green pass they may leave their SH room and head to the library
6. Once they arrive at the library they will tell the librarian their name, and the librarian will check the e-hallpass dashboard to make sure the student has a “green” ehallpass. If so, the librarian clicks “end/keep” to sign the student in
7. Students then remain in the library for the remainder of the period

Library Lunch Pass Logistics

Library-lunch passes work the same way as the study hall passes, except instead of opening the capacity for those every period we only open it during the lunch periods. Students do the pass “from cafeteria” to “library-lunch” and when the request shows up on our dashboard we click “approve.” When students see their pass turn to green they know they have our permission to come to the library from the cafeteria.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, the Securly passes aren’t really developed with library’s specific needs in mind, but it is possible to develop some workarounds to still make it work. It took me some time to play around with different options to see what would work best for our school, and some of the things we tried at first did not work but after 2 years of refining the processes we have now landed on a process that works really well. A lot of teachers don’t love e-hallpass because it does add another task for them, and dealing with pass requests during instruction can, I’m sure, become frustrating and overwhelming. But from the library perspective the pass system works really well, because we were already having to spend a lot of time dealing with passes and pass issues anyway, so this is not an additional task for us. Rather it makes the task easier because now we are able to actually limit the number of kids being sent to us at a time, we can see clearly if they have permission to be in the library ( no more illegible post-it note passes of dubious authenticity), and we can see clearly where they are coming from and for what purpose. It has been pretty great for us and has really cut down on us having to try to track down whether kids were actually allowed to be out of their class or not at any given time. I like it a lot, though hope it will one day be adjusted to function better for library pass needs rather than needing so many “workarounds” 🙂