12 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN works with 60,000 schools globally, including more than 5,000 K-12 U.S. school districts. As part of Raptor, SmartPass will reach millions of teachers and students. Luba serves as director of product at Raptor. SmartPass is a digital hall pass system that eliminates the need for teachers and administrators to manage students who need to go to places outside the classroom, such as the restroom, the nurse’s office or the principal’s office. “Teachers have the hardest job in the world, and we want to make it easier,” says Luba. The app works this way: Students who want to leave the classroom ask a teacher for permission, then press a button in the app to make a formal request. At that time, a countdown timer will start to let the student know how much time they have. On a practical basis, SmartPass minimizes classroom disruption and provides information about where students are at all times. It can put students in a queue for the nurse or the restroom. It can deny a hall pass to a student if another student of concern is also out of the classroom or if a student has had too many passes in one day. SmartPass encourages students to be responsible for themselves. One of the app’s primary functions is improving school safety. Bullying can be addressed. Vandalism and vaping can be disrupted. And in cases of emergency, administrators will know where all students are, which wasn’t possible under the old system. “The main benefit is it reduces all the hallway chaos that was previously happening,” says Luba. But much more happens in the background. SmartPass collects and analyzes data that provides schools with valuable information to improve student performance. It can tell how much time a student has not been in class and provide insight into why a student isn’t performing well. It can analyze student movement patterns in an era where there are more students and more places to go. According to Luba, schools have reported that SmartPass has resulted in as much as a 60 percent reduction in missed classes and 45 percent drops in behavioral referrals. THE JOURNEY Luba’s path to success has been a whirlwind journey that you might say was in Luba’s genes. The oldest child of a father who worked in product management and a mother in finance, Luba was influenced by both. “I was always tinkering around and building random stuff,” he says, starting with LEGO bricks and K’NEX. Born and raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, Luba was very engaged as a student in the Methacton School District, and he created his first app as a sophomore in high school. He says students were annoyed with the clunky website the school used to share grades, so Luba and Sringari created an app that notified students every time a grade was posted. They named it Sapphire Access, after the old system, Sapphire. Luba wasn’t schooled in creating apps; he says he and Sringari taught themselves. Luba says teachers continued to input grades in the old website, but the app would log in, pull out the information and notify students. It spread like wildfire, with 80 percent of students using it, Luba says, before the school put a new system in place. Then, during a coding class at the end of their senior year in 2018, Luba and Sringari worked with their assistant principal on an app to tackle another school problem— tracking students’ use of hall passes. “Students were wandering around the school hallways. Every single period they were leaving the classroom, and there was no way to monitor this,” says Luba. “Our school had gotten Chromebooks and we wondered why we were still using paper sign-out sheets. Why couldn’t students just click a couple of buttons and notify the teacher where they wanted to go?” They named their app SmartPass, and Luba says teachers immediately loved it. It took bothersome and time-consuming student monitoring out of their hands. “If you wanted to know who vandalized the bathroom at 10 a.m., in a couple of clicks, you would know,” Luba says. Soon after, Luba and Sringari were off to college, but they kept working on SmartPass. Sringari went to Penn State to study computer science. Luba says he chose Lehigh because he could combine his interests in business and technology. He enrolled in the Integrated Business and Engineering program but switched to Computer Science and Business when he realized he wanted to be in the tech space. “I knew that even if I didn’t want to do coding, having the understanding and fundamentals would be super important,” he says. In between classes and activities, Luba and Sringari were improving, marketing and selling SmartPass. Luba says work- “ Teachers have the hardest job in the world, and we want to make it easier.” —Peter Luba ’22
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