Hall Pass Alternatives
Published by Asan Digital LLC, the makers of EduQueue. EduQueue is not a hall-pass app. SmartPass, Raptor, Securly, e-hallpass, Minga and 5-Star Students are trademarks of their owners; we compare, we don’t affiliate.

An argument, not a listicle

Do you need a hall-pass app?

Sometimes. The honest answer depends on what problem you are buying it for, and on whether anyone in the building will act on the data it produces. This page tries to be fair to the vendors, who make real products, and to the students, who did not choose to be logged.

First, what these tools are not

Both large vendors are explicit that a digital hall pass is not a location tracker. Raptor: “Contrary to popular belief, digital hall passes aren’t designed to track students in real time. There’s no live location monitoring.”17 Securly: “It does not use GPS … It only knows the student’s intended destination.”18 That is accurate, and it matters. A pass system records what a paper pass records — who, when, where they said, when back — and makes it queryable. The debate is not about tracking; it is about what happens when a paper habit becomes a database with a dashboard.

Where digital passes earn their keep

Restroom safety and vaping

Two students in the same restroom at the same time, repeatedly, is the pattern behind most vaping, most fights and a share of bullying. Every tool on the comparison can cap how many students are out at once and flag the repeat pairing: SmartPass “Encounter Prevention” and room limits, Securly “Contact Control” and location limits, Minga “Automated Meetup Blocking”.4,5,11,14 A paper log cannot do that across six classrooms in real time. If this is your problem, the software solves something a policy cannot.

Meeting limits and the “frequent flyer”

A student who leaves the same period every day is telling you something — about the class, the teacher, the hallway or their life. Per-student limits (per day, week or term) make the pattern visible without a teacher having to remember it.4,14 The value is the visibility, not the block; a limit that is applied as a punishment rather than a prompt for a conversation wastes the data.

Fairness, honestly applied

Securly’s strongest argument is that consistent rules “minimize the potential for personal biases”.18 Anyone who has watched who gets waved out of a classroom and who gets told to wait knows this is not a straw man. A tool that applies the same duration to every student, and records that it did, is a fairness instrument if the school reads its own reports for disparities. It is the reading that does the work.

Emergencies

“Who is out of class right now” is a real question during a lockdown. Live dashboards answer it.11 The same question at the building level — who is in the building at all — is answered at the door, which is our product’s territory and why we think the two are complements (see Integration).

Where they become theatre

Bought for the dashboard

Frederick County’s board approved SmartPass 3–2, on a three-year term with a two-year option.7 New York City spent $368,000 in 2025 across 167 schools.8 Those are not large sums per school, but they are recurring, and the question a board should ask before the vote is: who reads the report on Friday, and what do they do on Monday? The ACLU’s 2023 report on the school-surveillance market put its spending at $3.1 billion a year and warned districts not to “rely on unsubstantiated efficacy claims” from vendors.19 We would put it more gently: the efficacy is in the follow-up, and no vendor can sell you that.

The student experience

The Gothamist reporting is worth reading whole. A senior described the system as having “taken micromanaging students to a whole other level”, and described a loophole: “a student couldn’t use the bathroom because another student had signed out as them”.8 The NYCLU’s education-policy director called it “just creepy”.8 The ACLU’s survey of 502 students found 87% reported surveillance technology at school and, per K-12 Dive’s coverage, 32% said it made them “always feel like I’m being watched” — while 40% said it made them feel safe.19 Both numbers are true at once. A school that adopts passes without telling students what is recorded, for how long, and who sees it, is choosing the first number.

Retention nobody wrote down

Securly publishes that student data is deleted within 30 days of a contract ending and is never sold or used to build profiles.12 SmartPass’s privacy link now resolves to Raptor’s website policy, which says in terms that it does not cover services to schools; the services policy was not at a public URL we could reach.9 That is not evidence of bad practice — it is evidence of a gap in what is published. Ask for the services privacy policy and put the retention period in your contract, whichever vendor you choose. Our policy template has the line.

Measuring the wrong door

This is our bias, stated plainly. A pass records movement between rooms. The movement that decides whether a child is counted present, whether a pattern of late arrival is caught in October rather than March, and whether the front desk knows who is in the building, happens at the door. Chronic absence ran at about 28% nationally in 2022–23,20 and the early-warning research says routinely collected absence data predicts it well and that waiting buys only “a few points of accuracy”.21 A school with a $3-per-student pass system and a paper tardy sheet has instrumented the corridor and left the door dark.

A fair test before you buy

  1. Name the problem. Restroom meet-ups, vaping, a wandering period, lockdown headcount. If you cannot name it, you are buying a dashboard.
  2. Name the reader. Who opens the report weekly, and what is the first action they take. Put the name in the policy.
  3. Try it on paper for a month. The free log has the same columns. If nobody reads the paper, nobody will read the software.
  4. Get retention in writing. Deletion at contract end, export on request, no secondary use. Securly’s published clause is a reasonable template.12
  5. Tell the students. What is recorded, who sees it, how long it lasts. The vendors’ own rebuttals say the tools are not trackers;17,18 say that to the people being recorded, in their language.
  6. Instrument the door first, or at the same time. Late arrival and dismissal produce attendance codes; passes produce minutes. Codes are what the SIS, the state and the early-warning model run on.

Sources (all fetched 4 September 2026)

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. smartpass.app/pricing is a demo-request form with no prices, tiers or terms. smartpass.app/pricing
  7. 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)
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. securly.com/pricing is a demo-request page with no prices; sales contact only. securly.com/pricing
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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
  17. 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
  18. 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
  19. 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.
  20. 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
  21. 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

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