Why I Filed a Lawsuit Against Beaverton School District Over Its Digital Hall Pass System
On April 21, 2025, I took the Beaverton School District to court. This isn't just about bathroom passes—it's about student privacy, parental rights, and a public school system that is increasingly operating without transparency or consent.
📌 What Is the Digital Hall Pass System?
In January 2025, Beaverton School District quietly launched a new digital hall pass system (DHP) at eight of its middle schools. Students are now required to submit digital requests before leaving class for basic needs like using the restroom, going to the nurse, or accessing their locker. Teachers must approve the request, and the system logs the destination, time, and duration of each pass. These records are stored indefinitely in the district's Synergy Student Information System (SIS).
But this isn’t just a digitized version of the old paper pass. The DHP system is being actively used for behavioral monitoring and intervention. Staff teams regularly analyze student hall pass data to identify "top users" – students who leave class more frequently than average. These students may be flagged and referred to counselors or behavior specialists, often before parents are notified or involved.
The district has positioned this system as a solution to behavioral challenges in middle schools. But what they’re not saying is that these challenges were in large part created by their own policies. Over a decade ago, Beaverton phased out traditional disciplinary frameworks in favor of restorative justice, which has often led to inconsistent enforcement and a breakdown in accountability. Rather than confront this reality and reevaluate their discipline model, the district has doubled down—choosing to surveil every student instead.
What we now have is a tool that collects sensitive behavioral data on children, distributes access to dozens of staff members (many with no connection to the student), and uses that data to preemptively flag students for intervention. And parents? They’re left in the dark.
🧠 How I Found Out
I first learned about the system from my daughter, a student at Mountain View Middle School. She came home in January 2025 feeling anxious about new restrictions on bathroom use and a built-in timer that threatened consequences if she took too long.
After requesting records and information from school officials, I discovered that 154 staff members—many with no connection to my daughter—had access to her personal hall pass data. This included nearly every staff member at her school, along with teachers, nurses, and administrators from other schools and district offices.
District documents also revealed that this data is regularly reviewed by staff to identify “top users” who may be flagged for counseling or behavioral intervention. In many cases, parents are not notified until after their children have already been questioned by staff.
⚖️ What the Law Says
My lawsuit argues that the district's actions violate both federal and Oregon law. Key claims include:
The Fourteenth Amendment: Parents have a constitutional right to direct the upbringing and medical decisions of their children.
ORS 336.184 & ORS 336.187: These laws require schools to notify parents and provide opt-out rights for behavioral or health-related screenings.
ORS 326.565: Governs student educational records and restricts access to those with a legitimate educational interest.
The district has tried to justify the system under the doctrine of in loco parentis, but public schools are government actors and cannot override parental rights without due process.
🚨 Why This Should Concern Every Parent
This is not just a Beaverton issue. The DHP system impacts more than 6,400 students and was implemented without any meaningful explanation, opt-out process, or oversight. If your district isn’t using something like this yet, it might be next.
A quick Google search for “digital hall pass” shows this is a national trend. Several companies now offer digital tracking platforms to schools across the country, marketing them as tools to manage hallway behavior and curb discipline issues. School districts in states like Texas, Florida, and New Jersey have adopted similar systems—with varying levels of transparency about how student data is used or who has access to it.
These systems are being marketed as modern tools for classroom management. But in practice, they function as behavioral surveillance networks that track kids in ways most parents are never told about.
As I said in my court declaration:
"This is not a digitized bathroom pass. It’s a behavioral surveillance platform that profiles students without their knowledge, and certainly without ours as parents."
📂 What the Lawsuit Seeks
I am asking the court to:
Immediately suspend the use of the digital hall pass system district-wide;
Prevent further collection and analysis of DHP data;
Require the district to submit an inventory of the data collected through the system;
Permanently purge all previously collected data;
Affirm the rights of parents to be notified and provide meaningful consent before schools launch systems that collect and/or act on sensitive behavioral data.
🔍 The Bigger Picture
We all want safe schools and orderly classrooms. But those goals can’t be achieved by stripping away privacy or sidelining parents.
This digital hall pass system is part of a broader trend in public education: chasing shiny, unproven "high tech" solutions to problems that districts themselves helped create. In Beaverton's case, the core issue isn’t bathroom trips—it’s a decade-long failure to maintain consistent school discipline.
Back in the 2013–14 school year, the district replaced traditional, structured discipline systems with restorative justice. Since then, staff have been asked to manage disruptive behavior with vague guidance, fewer consequences, and little to no support. Predictably, hallway chaos, class skipping, and bathroom incidents have increased. Instead of acknowledging their approach to discipline isn’t working, the district is now trying to solve it with software.
Rather than setting clear expectations and using fair, consistent consequences, Beaverton has opted to surveil every child to control the few who misbehave. That’s not innovation—it’s institutional overreach.
We can do better—and we must.
📁 Resources & Next Steps
You can read the full complaint, declaration, and motion for a temporary restraining order at:
👉 https://bit.ly/Myers-v-BSD
If you're a parent and want to understand whether something like this is being used in your child's school, the first step is simple: ask your child. Do they have to use an app, website, or other type of “technology” to request access to the bathroom, nurse, or lockers? If the answer is yes, then it's worth asking more questions.
To help you get started, I’ve put together a list of sample questions adapted from the ones I asked my daughter’s principal. You can use them to get the facts, clarify how student data is being handled, and push for accountability.
It might feel uncomfortable to ask these kinds of questions, but at the end of the day, it’s about doing what’s right for your child. There’s nothing wrong with that!
👉 https://bit.ly/DHP-Questions