Three weeks down, and 36 more of battling Securly.
Securly is the new digital pass system that was bought by De Pere High School and implemented at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year.
Unlike what was hoped, the Securly pass system isn’t working like planned.
“I think we need to get used to using the new things, so it’s going to take a lot of time to work out the kinks and the issues that are going on just like it did when we started Smartpass,” said Ivy Jeskie, an assistant principal. “The same kind of things were happening.”
The biggest problem is that students are not able to end their own passes without auto pass. The result of this is when students need a pass somewhere it interrupts the lesson, and the teacher needs to stop what they were doing.
“It would be nice if they could end their own passes because if I’m in the middle of teaching, I wouldn’t want to stop and end a pass to somebody’s locker,” said Rachel Stoddard, a science teacher. “I’ve thought about letting students auto start and end passes to anywhere, but then that’s almost too much freedom.”
Teachers are also forgetting to end passes when students get back, as students can’t do it themselves.
“I do have a lot of passes that run and run and run,” Stoddard said.
Jeskie said that the district switched from Smartpass to Securly because several programs used would be in the same place: Securly allows passes, flex and screen monitoring to all be through the same program.
According to Jeskie, another benefit to Securly was collecting data on the number of passes for each student and time those students are spending outside of the classroom. They can also collect data on if students are meeting up, and she is able to block those students from making passes at the same time.
“Because the system is new, and because school started, we are going to work out a lot of the issues,” Jeskie said. “In the summer when we had it, we couldn’t tell because kids weren’t using it.
“Just stick with it. We will figure it out.”
