On any given school day, students can be found working on math problems, listening to lectures or participating in English discussions in their classes. Suddenly, the door opens, interrupting the teacher and an unfamiliar face of a runner walks in with a pink pass. The class begins to “ooh” as the pass is handed off to a student, who now wonders what trouble he or she’ll be in, as he or she makes his or her way to the Dean’s Office.
However, a pass to the Dean’s Office does not necessarily mean trouble, according to Dean Sean Garrison.
“If we need to see a student for any reason, be it a referral for behavior issues, referral for attendance issues, or it could just be we need to see somebody because their parents dropped something off or we have a lost and found item we have found that is theirs […] there’s lots of reasons why we call students down,” Garrison said.
Senior J.J. Connor feels throughout the day, generally at least one of his classes will have a pink pass delivered per day. Often, they are for him.
“There’s spurts of weeks where I get them a lot and then I don’t get them for a while, but I get more than the average person,” he said.
According to Connor, many of his passes are for not serving detentions and for being tardy. He also recalled a time period of about three weeks when he got a pass nearly every day in English.
“Everyone in my class is thinking I’m this [bad person] but it’s just for like dumb stuff,” Connor said. “And I don’t know, I guess they were like expecting I’m some rule breaker, but it’s really not that bad.”
Similarly, senior Sara Meinecke is sent many pink passes by runners, and recently estimates receiving about two each week. She explained that many of her passes read ‘now please’, even though at times the issues aren’t urgent.
However, when it comes to the ‘now please’, Garrison explained that selection of the box relies on the urgency or the situation as well as about the dean’s availability.
According to Garrison, the goal of the Dean’s Office is to resolve referrals within 24 hours, and in order to do so it’s beneficial to take care of an issue earlier in the morning, typically before lunch periods.
“For the most part, [‘now please’ on passes is based] on the urgency through our schedule and our ability to see students,” Garrison explained. “A lot of times we’ll get called into meetings and that takes time away and I may need to see a student on a particular issue before they make it back to that class the next day, so that’s kind of what it revolves around.”
Still, David Kane, social studies teacher, feels that passes often disrupt from class itself.
“I think it would work better if they were issued for the end of class,” Kane said. “At the start of class we are often outlining the assignment of the day, taking a quiz or giving a presentation. Sometimes these visits interrupt what we do in class or what the individual student should be doing.”
Garrison stated that the Dean’s Office does its best to not pull kids out of core classes, yet sometimes it’s unavoidable due to the sheer volume they deal with.
Furthermore, Garrison explained that pink passes function not only for the Dean’s Office, but also for the Guidance, Attendance and Student Activities Offices. This is to minimize classroom disturbances for a teacher, because only one runner will consolidate passes for each location.
Yet, despite the fact that the passes are interconnected between various offices, 45 percent of students assume others are in trouble when they receive a pink pass in class, based on an Oracle-conducted survey of 207 students.
“The preponderance of these pink passes do come from the deans, so I think there’s still an association with the fact that pink equals deans,” Garrison said. “But I think that’s because people don’t realize other departments are utilizing us to run those passes.”
