In the early 2000s, millions of Americans stuck a small plastic box to their windshield and drove through toll booths without stopping. EZ-Pass. Simple. Convenient. A technology designed to do exactly one thing: collect tolls faster.

Nobody read the fine print.

Within a few years, divorce attorneys in Illinois were subpoenaing EZ-Pass records to prove that spouses were driving to places they’d denied visiting. Law enforcement agencies were pulling location histories without warrants. In New York, the ACLU discovered that EZ-Pass readers had been quietly installed on city streets — not at toll plazas, on streets — tracking the movement of cars that had never agreed to be tracked anywhere other than a toll booth. A Port Authority official used the data to monitor a personal rival’s commute.

The ACLU’s Karen Sheley called it what it was: “This is supposed to be a program that collects money for when you drive on the roads. It should not be a system that allows the government to turn over to private litigants detailed information about your whereabouts.”

She called it mission creep.

Here’s why that matters to us.

The iPad by the Door

A recent Gothamist article reported that 167 New York City schools are now using a digital hall pass system called SmartPass. Students sign out on an iPad mounted by the classroom door every time they leave the room. The system logs where they went, how long they were gone, and whether their trip exceeded the time limit. Any teacher or staff member in the building can pull up a live dashboard showing every student currently out of class — where they’re headed and how long they’ve been gone.

The stated purpose? To “disrupt bathroom meetups.”

The price tag? Nearly half a million dollars in public money over two years.

And look — I’m not going to pretend that bathroom meetups aren’t a real problem. Kids fight in bathrooms. They vape in bathrooms. They do things in bathrooms that none of us want them doing. If you’ve spent any time in a school building, you know that hallways and bathrooms can be genuinely unsafe spaces. I’m not dismissing that.

But here’s the thing: Johanna Miller, director of education policy at the NYCLU, called the system “creepy” — and then said something that should stop every educator in their tracks. She warned that these systems will “inevitably turn a student into a product and turn a student’s behavior into a long-term record that is exploitable, hackable, and can be used against the kids.”

Read that again. A long-term record. Exploitable. Hackable. Used against kids.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s the same story as EZ-Pass. A technology introduced for one purpose — convenience, safety, efficiency — that creates an infrastructure of data. And once the infrastructure exists, the uses expand. They always expand.

What We’re Actually Teaching

Here’s what bugs me the most about this: We’ve spent the last 25 years normalizing surveillance technologies in schools in the name of student safety. Metal detectors. Clear backpacks. School resource officers. Surveillance cameras in every hallway. And now, digital tracking of every trip to the bathroom.

Each one was introduced with the same justification: We’re doing this to keep kids safe. And each one, by itself, might be defensible. I get it. There ARE buildings where student safety was a legitimate, daily concern.

But zoom out. Look at the pattern, not just the individual decision. What are we actually teaching an entire generation of students about the relationship between institutions and the people inside them?

We’re teaching them that being monitored is normal. That having your movements logged and timestamped is just what happens when you’re part of an organization. That the people in charge have the right — maybe even the responsibility — to know where you are, what you’re doing, and how long it takes you to do it.

And that generation — the one that grew up walking through metal detectors with clear backpacks while an iPad timed their bathroom breaks — is going to become the generation that decides what level of surveillance is acceptable for the rest of us. They’re going to be the voters. The policymakers. The employers. The parents.

I’m not comfortable with what we’re building. Not because any single piece of it is indefensible, but because the cumulative effect is a generation that has never known a world where institutions trusted them. And people who’ve never been trusted don’t tend to question surveillance when it shows up in their adult lives. They expect it.

That’s not a hallway management decision. That’s a societal one. And I don’t think we’re treating it that way.

The Question We’re Not Asking

But here’s the part that really gets me.

SmartPass “disrupts bathroom meetups.” Fine. Let’s accept that at face value. The technology works. Kids can no longer gather in the bathroom undetected.

So what?

Why were they gathering in the bathroom in the first place?

Gallup has been surveying students for years, and the data is brutal. Fewer than two in ten students strongly agree that what they’re learning in class feels important. Fewer than half say their schoolwork positively challenges them. About a third of students say they are always bored in class.

Always. Not sometimes. Always.

Kids aren’t fleeing to bathrooms because they’re no good, very bad people. They aren’t plotting in stairwells because they’re criminals. They’re leaving our spaces because we built spaces that give them no reason to stay. They don’t feel seen. They don’t feel important. They don’t believe they’re doing anything that matters.

And instead of asking ourselves why kids are trying to escape the classroom, we spent half a million dollars on technology to make the escape harder.

That’s not solving a problem. That’s containing one.

Don’t get me wrong — I understand the instinct. When kids are fighting or vaping or doing things that are genuinely dangerous, you need to respond. Nobody is arguing for unmonitored chaos. But there’s a difference between responding to unsafe behavior and building a surveillance system that treats every trip to the bathroom like a potential threat.

And there’s a much bigger difference between asking “How do we stop kids from leaving?” and asking “How do we build a space they actually want to be in?”

The Shift

Here’s a challenge for you: The next time someone in your school or district proposes a new system to monitor, track, or restrict student movement, ask this question:

Have we spent as much time, money, and energy making our classrooms places students want to be as we have making them places students can’t leave?

Because if the honest answer is no — and in most buildings, I think the honest answer is no — then the tracking system isn’t a solution. It’s a confession. It’s an admission that we’d rather monitor kids out of spaces than give them a reason to stay.

Kids don’t believe they are capable, competent learners in spaces that treat them like suspects. They don’t develop hope in buildings that track their bathroom breaks. And they sure don’t develop a healthy relationship with institutional authority when every move they make is logged, timestamped, and stored in a system that — as the NYCLU warned — can be used against them.

We keep blaming the behaviors on students. But the research says the behaviors are a response to the conditions we’ve created. Until we address those conditions — until we build classrooms where kids feel seen, feel challenged, and feel like what they’re doing matters — they will keep finding ways to leave.

No bathroom tracking app is going to fix that.

#steppingoffsoapbox