Imagine being a short student walking through a crowded hallway and you continue to get shoved around, you almost get trampled, you almost drop something, or you almost fall down the stairs. This is what the hallways feel like for a short student trying to get to class.

As a short student, traveling from class to class is difficult because of the crowded hallways. I have almost been trampled, pushed and pulled down the stairs, and I almost dropped my iPad. 

One time, I was going up the stairs but there were a lot of people crowding going up and down the stairs, then something pulled on my bag and I almost fell down the stairs. 

Center Grove High School should create a hallway system. A hallway system would make the school hallways safer especially for shorter students.

An example for a hallway system would be creating “highways,” where traffic goes in one direction on the left, and the other on the right.

Another addition would be creating a rule that there should be no phones in the hallway. When people stare at their phones while driving, they risk getting into accidents. The same can be said for kids in the hallways.

Herron High School is a high school that uses a hallway system and has been using them since COVID. 

“Our biggest building does have a directional hallway on the first floor; we have an entrance and an exit,” Atticus Westerfeld, Director of Student Life at Herron High School, said. “So we don’t allow students to go out or in the opposite door so all the traffic goes into our Door One. As students exit to go to other buildings, they have to go through Door Two, then we have directional staircases as well, so each floor has two staircases as one goes up and one goes down.”

Not only would a hallway system make hallways safer, but it would also make traveling around the hallways easier. A hallway system would allow shorter students to not get trampled while walking around, and it would allow them to get up the stairs easier. 

“In the past, we couldn’t get kids in class at all when they were all trying to get through door one, our main door,” Westerfeld said. “So we talked about it during orientations, then on the first week of school we always station someone at door one where the hallway starts to come through door one, and they basically announce and have everybody go out through door two during passing periods.” 

Whenever I try to walk from one class to the other, it’s always hard because I can’t get around people as they keep moving forward no matter what. Some people push and shove while other people just end up looking at their phones walking extremely slowly blocking everybody.

I also feel like a hallway system will make kids get to class on time instead of loitering talking to their friends or looking down at their phone. Another benefit would be that a hallway system would help find troublemakers.

As a student I have seen some kids try to push other kids down the stairs. Not only that, some students like to throw stuff and make a mess, then they run away like nothing happened. 

There are other systems to consider. One option might be releasing students at different times might take a while, but it would make the hallways safer. If you release students by grade, I think that it should start from the twelfth grade, going to the ninth grade.

If dismissing students by grade wouldn’t work, students can be dismissed by classes. This system would work where students going to main classes would dismiss first, students leaving to extracurricular classes would leave second, and any student leaving for study hall would go last.

One of the last systems could be dismissing classes by floors, where the first floor dismisses first, the second second, and the third last.

In the end, I think that our school should make a hallway system that will make the hallways safer and easier to navigate around.