For principals, assistant principals, attendance officers and the front desk
SmartPass is part of Raptor now. What that means for your school.
Raptor Technologies bought SmartPass on 10 December 2024; the product is now “Raptor SmartPass” and its privacy page redirects to Raptor’s.1,3,9 Two years earlier, e-hallpass became Securly Pass.10 The two best-known hall-pass apps are now features inside two larger safety platforms. This site lays out the real choices — with a source for every claim — and then makes one argument of its own.
Read this first: EduQueue is not a hall-pass app. It does not issue restroom passes, cap passes per day or block two students from meeting in a corridor. What it does is the other half of student movement — campus check-in, late-arrival events with outcomes set by time window, building exchange for shared-campus students, and attendance posted back to PowerSchool. Union City Board of Education, NJ (about 11,500 students) runs it district-wide. If you need passes, one of the tools below is the answer, and we say so.
What changed, and what has not
Two platforms, not five apps
SmartPass sits inside Raptor’s “Campus Movement” suite next to visitor management and dismissal.5 e-hallpass is sold as Securly Pass next to Securly’s filtering and wellness products.10,11 Minga and 5-Star Students sell passes as one module of a wider student-engagement platform.14,15
Mostly quote-only
SmartPass, Securly and Minga publish no prices.6,13,14 The one public SmartPass figure we can verify is Frederick County, MD: $3.15 per student per year on a three-year term.7 5-Star Students publishes a per-school price list.15 We have found no published statement on how SmartPass is priced or bundled post-acquisition; the announcement says nothing about it.1
Bathroom data is now a public argument
New York City spent $368,000 on SmartPass in 2025 across 167 schools, and the rollout drew a 1,400-signature petition and an NYCLU comment of “It’s just creepy.”8 Both Raptor and Securly have published rebuttals.17,18 We weigh both sides on Do you need a hall-pass app?
Hall-pass tools at a glance
The four products a school shopping for digital passes will actually shortlist. Every cell is cited below; “not published” means we looked and the vendor has not said. EduQueue is in a separate column on purpose.† The full comparison adds “when to pick” notes for each.
| Criterion | SmartPass (Raptor) | Securly Pass (was e-hallpass) | Minga | 5-Star Students | EduQueue † arrival, tardy & dismissal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per student; quote-only. Public record: $3.15/student/yr (Frederick County, MD)4,6,7 | Quote-only13 | Basic / Plus / Premium; quote-only14 | Published per-school list: $1,400–$2,650/yr renewal by enrolment, plus start-up fee15 | Per building; one building free |
| SIS / LMS integration | Rostering via Clever, ClassLink, Google or CSV; attendance from activities “exported to the SIS”4,5 | not named on the product page11 | “MingaSync” rostering from the SIS; systems not named14 | not published | PowerSchool roster sync; attendance write-back (see Integration) |
| Privacy / data retention | Compliance badges (COPPA, SDPC); privacy page redirects to Raptor’s website policy, which excludes school services; retention period not published3,9 | Deleted within 30 days after the agreement ends; no sale, no profiling, no ads12 | not published on the pages we could reach | policy pages exist; retention period not on them | Export on request; deletion on request at contract end |
| Offline / kiosk mode | Kiosk mode (Standard tier and up); offline not published4,5 | “Pass Kiosk” for cafeterias, gyms, offices; offline not published11 | Kiosk mode; offline not published14 | Barcode scanning; kiosk/offline not published15 | Kiosk on any browser with a camera; ID barcode scan; no offline mode |
| Parent visibility | “Parent Accounts” on the Pro tier5 | not published | Weekly parent email summary14 | Communications add-on is student-facing, “NOT A PARENT COMMUNICATION TOOL”15 | None built in; attendance code flows to the SIS, which notifies parents |
| Restroom / meeting limits | Limits per day, week or term; encounter prevention; room capacity4,5 | Pass limits by student, group or grade; “Contact Control”; location limits11 | Daily limits; restroom-specific limit; meetup blocking14 | not published | Not applicable — no passes |
| Contract term | Public record: 3 years + optional 2-year extension (Frederick County)7 | not published | not published | “1 year subscription”15 | Annual per building; free tier has no term |
| Tardy / late arrival | Missed-class-time tracking on Pro5 | “Tardy Management”11 | “built-in tardy management”14 | not published | Core: outcome by time window, attendance code, “Late to School” report |
† EduQueue is not a hall-pass app and is not offered as one. Its column is here so a reader can see where the campus-arrival tool sits next to the pass tools, not to score it against them. EduQueue cells are our own statements about our own product. Reference: Union City Board of Education, NJ.
Our one argument
A hall pass tells you a student left room 214 for the restroom at 10:42 and came back at 10:49. That is useful, and for some buildings it is worth the money. But the movement that determines whether a student is counted present, whether the front office knows who is in the building, and whether a parent hears about a pattern before it becomes chronic absence, happens at the door: arrival, late arrival, early dismissal, and the walk between two buildings on a shared campus.
Chronic absenteeism — missing 10% or more of the year — ran at about 28% nationally in 2022–23.20 Early-warning models built on nothing more exotic than routinely collected absence counts predict who will end up there with roughly 90% accuracy, and the lesson of that research is that waiting for clarity costs more than it earns.21 The late-arrival line is the earliest, cheapest signal a school owns. If it is a paper sign-in sheet, it is invisible.
So: keep or buy a hall-pass tool if the corridor is your problem. Put the door on a kiosk that assigns the attendance code itself and posts it to the SIS. The late-arrival playbook shows exactly how Union City does it, and Integration shows the two tools sitting side by side.
Where to go next
The full table, with “when to pick”
SmartPass, Securly Pass, Minga, 5-Star Students and a note on the newer flat-fee entrants, cell by cell.
PlaybookThe tardy kiosk, step by step
Scan, outcome by time window, code to PowerSchool, the daily report. With a printable front-desk SOP.
Free, no sign-upPaper pass log, tardy calculator, policy template
Useful whether or not you ever talk to us.
ContrarianDo you need a hall-pass app at all?
Where digital passes earn their keep, where they are theatre, and what the ACLU, NYCLU and the vendors say.
Sources (all fetched 4 September 2026)
- Raptor Technologies, “Raptor Technologies Acquires SmartPass”, 10 December 2024: SmartPass is “a digital hall pass + student accountability solution that replaces traditional hall passes”, “supporting over 3,000 K–12 schools nationwide”; “The integration of SmartPass with Raptor’s product portfolio will provide the most comprehensive unified platform for schools to manage daily operations”. No pricing or bundling statement. raptortech.com
- EdWeek Market Brief, “K-12 Dealmaking: Raptor Acquires SmartPass; zSpace Raises $10.8M in IPO”, 12 December 2024: terms not disclosed; SmartPass previously raised seed funding from Reach Capital and Edovate Capital; Raptor backed by Thoma Bravo and JMI Equity; follows Raptor’s April 2023 purchase of SchoolPass. marketbrief.edweek.org
- smartpass.app home page: product now styled “Raptor SmartPass”, “Now a Raptor Technologies Company”; “Smarter Movement for 2 million+ Educators and Students”; “Manage Virtual Queues, Room Capacities, and Pass Limits”; iOS app with kiosk mode; COPPA and SDPC badges; “All SmartPass products are compliant with data protection regulations and standards”. smartpass.app
- smartpass.app/hall-pass: “Limit the number of passes students can have per day, week or term”; “Prevent 2+ students from being in the hallways at the same time. They are automatically blocked and notifications are sent to teachers”; kiosk at the main office or in classrooms; rostering via Clever, ClassLink, Google, or CSV; tiers named Lite, Standard, Pro; no dollar amounts. smartpass.app/hall-pass
- Raptor, “SmartPass Digital Hall Pass System” product page: plan matrix with “Kiosk Mode” and “Passes Need Approval” at Standard and above, “Parent Accounts”, “Missed Class Time Tracking”, “Emergency Mode” and “AI-powered Detected Encounters” at Pro; “Attendance can be taken and edited directly within activities, then exported to the SIS”; presented within Raptor’s “Campus Movement” suite alongside visitor and dismissal products. raptortech.com
- smartpass.app/pricing is a demo-request form with no prices, tiers or terms. smartpass.app/pricing
- The Frederick News-Post, “Schools can purchase digital hall pass system starting in July”, 14 May 2025 (republished by Raptor): Frederick County Public Schools, MD, awarded Raptor a SmartPass contract at $3.15 per student per year, July 2025 through June 2028 with one optional two-year extension, on a 3–2 board vote. raptortech.com (reprint)
- Gothamist, Jessica Gould, “New digital hall passes track bathroom breaks, gather data in NYC schools”, 24 March 2026: NYC education department spent $368,000 on SmartPass contracts in 2025 and $120,000 the year before; 167 schools; student Shokhjakhon Samiev: “It’s taken micromanaging students to a whole other level”; NYCLU’s Johanna Miller: “It’s just creepy”; DOE’s Onika Richards: “all approved tools must meet established privacy and security standards”; ~1,400-signature petition for an AI moratorium. gothamist.com
- smartpass.app/privacy returns HTTP 301 to raptortech.com/privacy-policy/ (last updated July 2026), which states it “does not apply to any information we collect pursuant to agreements to provide services to our customers, including schools” and refers to a separate services privacy policy we could not reach at a public URL. A student-data retention period for SmartPass is therefore not published where we could find it. raptortech.com/privacy-policy
- eduspiresolutions.org/e-hallpass/ returns HTTP 301 to securly.com/pass. Securly’s blog announced that Securly and Eduspire (e-hallpass, FlexTime Manager) had “joined forces”, quoting Securly CEO Bharath Madhusudan. blog.securly.com
- Securly Pass product page: “Live Dashboard”, “Student Pass Limits”, “Contact Control”, “Auto-Pass”, “Appointment Pass”, “Location Pass Limits”, “Pass Kiosk”, “Proxy Pass”, “Tardy Management”; “All data in Securly Pass is encrypted and protected using industry standard security practices”; data collected is names, school emails, optionally ID number and grade. No integrations or prices named on the page. securly.com/pass
- Securly Privacy Policy, effective 19 January 2026: Student Information deleted “when it is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was collected and in any case, within thirty (30) days after the School’s agreement with us ends”; “Securly does not: Sell Student Information; Build Student profiles for commercial purposes; or Use Student Information for advertising”; acts as a FERPA “school official”. securly.com/privacy
- securly.com/pricing is a demo-request page with no prices; sales contact only. securly.com/pricing
- Minga, “Digital Hall Pass”: “Daily Hall Pass Limits: Prevent ‘frequent flyers’ by capping the number of passes per student”; restroom-specific limit example “3 per day”; “Kiosk Mode”; “Weekly Parent Summaries: Parents get a weekly email summary of their child’s behavior and missed class time”; “Automated Meetup Blocking”; “built-in tardy management”; rostering from the SIS via “MingaSync”; tiers Basic, Plus, Premium, prices on request. minga.io/digital-hall-pass; scale claim “over 2,500+ Schools and 750 Districts” from minga.io.
- 5-Star Students, Pricing: per-school annual subscription including hall passes; secondary schools by enrolment — under 300 students $2,300 start-up / $1,400 renewal; 300–1,000 $2,850 / $1,850; 1,001–2,500 $3,350 / $2,250; 2,501–5,000 $3,850 / $2,650; student-communications add-on $250–$1,000; on-site training $2,500/day. 5starstudents.com/Pricing; hall pass and barcode-scan features from 5starstudents.com.
- Hallwise (a competing hall-pass vendor) publishes a comparison page claiming SmartPass at “$2.50–$5 per student” and e-hallpass at “$3–$5 per student … plus $1,000 one-time setup”, and states “Neither vendor publishes a price list; both quote on request.” Competitor-authored; we cite it for the range and the quote-only point only, and the one primary figure we can verify is note 7. hallwise.com/compare
- Raptor blog, “Student Visibility Isn’t Surveillance. It’s Safety & Accountability.”, 1 May 2026: “Contrary to popular belief, digital hall passes aren’t designed to track students in real time. There’s no live location monitoring.” raptortech.com
- Securly blog, “3 Digital Hall Pass Myths Debunked”, March 2024: “Securly Pass is not a tracking and surveillance device. It does not use GPS … It only knows the student’s intended destination.”; principal quoted that hallway numbers “gone down by 30-40%”. blog.securly.com
- ACLU, press release for “Digital Dystopia: The Danger in Buying What the EdTech Surveillance Industry is Selling”, 3 October 2023: 87% of 502 surveyed students aged 14–18 report surveillance technology at school; 26% concerned about data privacy; K-12 spending on security products estimated at $3.1 billion in 2021. aclu.org; coverage with the 32% “always feel like I’m being watched” and 40% “safe” figures: K-12 Dive, Anna Merod, 6 October 2023, k12dive.com.
- U.S. Department of Education, “Chronic Absenteeism”: “typically defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days, or approximately 18 days in a year, for any reason, excused or unexcused”; national rate about 31% in 2021–22 and 28% in 2022–23. ed.gov
- Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon, “Need Not Be a Surprise: Early-Warning Systems for Chronic Absenteeism”, American Enterprise Institute, 14 October 2025 (updated 27 May 2026): models built on routinely collected absence counts predict chronic absence at roughly 90% accuracy; “Waiting to intervene until midway through the year will certainly make it clearer which students are on track to become chronically absent, but by only a few points of accuracy.” The report models absence counts, not tardies. aei.org