Published November 7, 2024
BY ZANA BALABAN
In a bid to enhance student engagement, a program called 5-Star Students is being rolled out at Carmel High School, currently piloted for its electronic hall pass feature and designed to streamline campus operations and track participation in various campus activities.
The program is used in several districts in California, including in Fresno and Sacramento. From her time at Salinas High School, current CHS Principal Libby Duethman has experience with 5-Star’s inner workings.
“We’re very excited to see how 5-Star will succeed in its role on campus,” Duethman says. “For vandalism in the bathroom, for example, we could look on 5-Star and see the names of the kids who checked out to go to the bathroom at the time we think something may have happened.”
The database details the whereabouts of every student and specifies locations between different bathrooms around campus and other destinations such as the main office or the wellness center.
The trial period for 5-Star’s electronic hall pass has been initiated in the classrooms of graphic design and photography teacher Holly Lederle and art teacher Steven Russell. Both teachers stress how it can be used as a safety tool, as CHS does not currently have a uniform system for students when checking out of class. This way, students’ whereabouts will be known across the board and consolidated in one system.
“5-Star is just really clear who is supposed to be where and what they are doing,” says Lederle, who attended the training alongside Russell, assistant principal Laurel Gast and Associated Student Body faculty adviser Aubrey Powers.
By communicating with educators from other districts at the training who had experience with integrating 5-Star, the training better equipped Lederle and Russell to pilot the hall passes in their classrooms and manage logistics.
“We went to the conference to learn about this program and how we could slowly introduce it to Carmel High School as a way to, not track kids’ movements,” Russell says, “but to hold them accountable and collect data on how often students are out of class.”
From a staff standpoint, the program streamlines many aspects of student management and organizes the data into one central system. As its usage at CHS advances, Duethman hopes to eventually use 5-Star to check in and record engagement at virtually every school event.
“The level of stuff that [5-Star] will do is kind of bananas,” Lederle says. “They can do surveys on here, voting, reward points….”
Serving as much more than just an attendance tracker, the broader potential of 5-Star is something Duethman keeps in close sight during this trial period. If adopted, the program would have an account linked to each student’s ID, and their profile would log tardies, discipline records and referrals as well as attendance at events such as school dances and sports games.
One key utilization would be to enrich office hours. Now scheduled in the middle of the school day on Thursdays, Duethman notes that many students don’t have the need or want to use this time as an instructional period and instead spend the 40-minute block walking around with friends or lying in the campus amphitheater.
“We really want everybody during office hours to have a place to go,” the principal explains. “So with 5-Star, we also want to bring in some special programming like college speakers, career speakers and human interest kinds of things.”
The administrative team is now working on building procedures and expects to slowly integrate the system into campus life, with the hopes of it being instated at full capacity by next school year.
