The bell rings, students rise from their seats and begin to walk to their next class. Then, they reach the hallway.  The hallway between rooms 16 and 17 have to be the most dreaded part of passing period. 

Every day during passing period the hallway gets filled with students coming from both ends of the hallway to get to their next classes.  The hallway fills up quickly and, soon after, becomes a stampede of students pushing past each other to get by quicker. 

Ironically, the hallway problem is even worse after nutrition and lunch.  Students should be able to get by easier seeing as to how everyone’s coming from the quad so they’re all going the same way.  However, staff members still go into the hallway and make sure everyone stays on the right side. 

First of all, an adult is just standing in the middle of the hallway trying to keep things organized.  All they are doing is taking up space and making it harder to get by.  The students going through the hallway tend to ignore their directions so having an adult in the hall does not have much benefit on the traffic. 

Another issue the hallway traffic brings is multiple students getting shoved around.  Because of the hallway overcrowding, students are always being pushed around in the hallway.  Everyone is in a rush to get to the next class, and this often results in shoving to get through the hallways faster. 

Along with this problem of pushing comes the additional problem of people being late to their classes.  When students are pushing past each other to get through the hall, they form a sort of wall that makes it so that people can’t even get into the hallway to get to their next classes. 

When I was in sixth grade, I had Mrs. Skipper third period and Mrs. Garcia fourth period. To get to Mrs. Garcia’s class from Mrs. Skipper’s, I had to go through the hallway and I would always struggle to get to her class because of the wave of students coming out of the hallway.  Every day, I would go into the crowd of students and sometimes I would even get pushed backward out of the hallway the way I came from.  This hallway causes too many inconveniences.

The rule on the hallway is to stay on the right side so traffic can flow quickly but this rule seems to be ineffective.  After lunch, the ratio of people going into the hallways to people coming out of the hallways is drastically uneven.  Fifteen students at most come out of the hallway every day after lunch while tons upon tons of students are trying to get into the hallway, yet staff still requires that we stay on the right side of the hall making the traffic flow much more crowded. 

I think an extended passing period would be a good solution to this problem.  If students have more time to get to their classes, they are less likely to push past each other just to get to class a minute quicker.  Extending the passing period from four minutes to five minutes seems reasonable and I think that this would ultimately be the smartest decision.