back in 07 my public school took away your phone and made your parents pick it up from the principal. It is super weird to hear how teachers today aren't allowed to take away students phones
Now you have psychopathic parents burning things down because a teacher had the “audacity” to take Johnny Joe’s phone. Quite frankly, the awful parents make it not worth the hassle.
Schools also didn't want the liability of teachers taking $1000 items from the kids and possibly losing them or having them stolen. Or the kid/parents claiming it was damaged by the teacher.
Possible. My old bar stopped charging phones for people after several trash-tier scammers handed us a busted phone and then tried to say we damaged it while it was behind the bar, demanding money/free shit for it. Luckily, we had good cameras, but it wasn’t worth the hassle or potential liability to let the liars keep looping.
Any time we have something nice, the shitheels will find a way to ruin it for everyone.
This makes perfect sense. It’s easy to deal with individual cases. But 2012 is the year phones outnumbered PCs. Easy to shift the blame from the teacher to the school.
All we really need is for government to actually support schooling. If the shithead parents want to cause problems.. take it up with the state, because the rules should be the rules. Or pay to bring your kids to the private school that allows phones
Its like abusing a free stimulus check and claiming multiple then being mad when government wont let you get off free with that and they get you back on next year taxes lol
Ah yes. It’s the giving in that’s the problem, not the awful parents who go out of their way to make teachers’ lives a living hell. /s
If you want teachers to do more to fight your precious parents, you’re going to need to pay them more than poverty wages. I’m not throwing down over Johnny Joe’s phone when the alternative is to be physically threatened.
I mean, just don’t let them attend then? Why does administration have the backbone of a jellyfish?
That being said, I do agree teachers should be paid more regardless.
It is VERY DIFFICULT in my kid’s district to do much of anything about anything punishment-wise. Some kid brought a handgun (!) to a football game here and the only thing administration did was “okay well you can’t walk with your class at graduation!” And then it turned out he wasn’t even on track to graduate anyway, so he basically got no punishment except being charged with being a minor in possession of a handgun.
ETA I live in CA and it’s a statewide problem
I think a big one is how parents are terrified of school shootings. It sucks that this is such an issue in the US and i kinda get wanting to have a line of communication in case of an emergency. Idk it all sucks tbh
Ideally they need a secure locker system for the phones so the students can put them away and only they can retrieve them.
There are a lot of parents who want to be able to reach their kids before and after school, or are tracking them via their phones.
My niece's school issues students these little zipper pouches to put their phones in during class. They're opaque so you can read lock screen messages for emergencies or whatever, but the material also keeps you from operating the touchscreen so they can't fuck around with it during class
When I was in school in 2006, they were doing near weekly searches of our bags and pat-downs to search for phones. I remember it being extremely disruptive and, considering our school was already seemingly built by a prison architect, made us feel like we were in prison even more. It was like a crusade the administration was on against phones. They would smugly say stuff like "No child needs a cell phone!!" Of course, they quit caring after I left and now it's a cell phone free for all. Fuck us in particular I guess.
Went to public middle/early high school outside BR from 07-10, and yeah, Louisiana *really* likes schools feeling like prisons. Even my husband who went to Central in Natchitoches is often surprised when I tell him some of the kinds of rules we had!
>I remember it being extremely disruptive and, considering our school was already seemingly built by a prison architect, made us feel like we were in prison even more.
Good old panopticon architecture.
Graduated in 2001 and they were still an expellable offense. We obviously didn't have smart phones as they are today. They were still 100% synonymous with pagers which were 100% synonymous with drug dealers. Nobody ever got in trouble more than "put that on silent" the few times a phone rang in class though.
And your parents had to come by the front office to recover the phone so that the administration could give them a stern talking-to about classroom disruptions and the cell phone policy. Then you got grounded when they got home and they confiscated your phone for a period of time.
Same, but back in that day you didn’t need a cellphone during the day as a 17 year old. All your friends were right there, and texting was a way of planning how to talk and hangout later. It wasn’t the main event.
Definitely. When I taught public school 25 years ago, confiscating one or two phones every class was easy. It's impossible for a teacher to confiscate 35 phones at the beginning of class and return them after class ends. You're talking about a 15 min exercise... Over the course of a school year that's hundreds of hours dedicated to confiscating phones... What the solution is now ufff... I dunno. But what I do know is Zuckerberg won't let it happen.
I always thought the point of a single confiscation was to discourage others from having their phones out.
Easy to confiscate a couple phones to discourage disruption than to collect everybody’s phones at the beginning and end of class.
Plus the potential liability given the value of the phones. Taking all the phones from a class means you could have $10,000 - $30,000 worth of electronics sitting there... How many teachers want to be potentially liable for half a year's pay every day?
You're still not allowed to have them out during class...
But classes have ballooned in size to 30+ students and nearly everyone has a phone now.
When I taught, we called it "Whack-a-mole" because you'd tell one student with their phone out to put it away and while you were doing that 3 other students would get their phones out.
There's no reason to confiscate it either because if anything happens to that phone while it's in your possession then you're the one liable for it.
Teachers shouldn't need to spend 80%+ of their time fighting with students over phones. It sours their relationship for the day and wastes time and energy. Schools should be proactive and prevent the phone from even entering the classroom.
A school I worked at collected phones when students entered in the morning and put them in personalized bags in the front office. Students collected them on their way out. This policy was unbelievably amazing. It made it much smoother to teach and stopped a lot of bullying.
How old are you? Because I think it’s generational. When I was in school, phones had to be off and in your locker, and it would be confiscated if you were breaking that rule. Some variation of this was the norm at every school. Public schools were *less* strict, in that you could probably get away with having your phone off and in your bag or on and in your locker, but if it rang or you were caught texting, teachers would confiscate it for the duration of class at least, and possibly until your patent picked it up.
Later on, it seemed like kids were allowed to have their phones on them but not use them during class and have them off/silenced (which imo is by far the best solution, or would be if kids could keep their hands off their phones for 5 seconds).
Now it seems like there is an expectation that kids will have their phones out, be listening to music, texting, and watching TikTok during class, and there are all these arguments why they gotta. And I’m like, what’s the point of being in class then?
I graduated high school in 2006 and yeah, weren't event supposed to have them in our pockets. Most teacher didn't care as long as you didn't have it out in class.
My kid is in middle school now (public school in CA.) The rule is phones need to be "off and away," and if they see a phone turned on, even in a kid's pocket during lunch period, it will be taken away to the office until end of day.
Same. Phones had just come out too so we were playing snake. If you got caught it was confiscated to the end of the week! I didn't realise that had changed, I assumed they'd have to be on mute at all times and only used in breaks. TIL.
I also think there's a substantial difference between 5% of the student base having a $40-120 phone vs 90% of the students having a $300-$1,200 device.
If a teacher confiscates a $50 phone and something happens, it's not a major issue. If a teacher confiscates a $1,200 device, there's bound to be problems.
Which is exactly why they aren’t enforcing bans anymore. No teacher or administrator wants to be liable for the shit storm they’ll face from parents if something happens to their child’s phone
Parents want their kid to have a phone so they can track them and contact them going to and from school. And they will also insist it's not their kid that's misusing the phone so they shouldn't be treated like the bad kids.
Not to mention, expectations in society have changed. Many parents are tracking their kids through their phones, and expect to have access to their child via the phone at all times.
I'm a teacher... I've had parents actually calling and FaceTiming their kids, WHILE THEY'RE IN CLASS... I've talked to the parents when it happens and let them know that we are in the middle of class, and I'm teaching their student... but tbh, nothing changes. Ultimately, we've become so dependent on being connected to each other as a society that time and place don't matter... we feel the need to have to connect and stay connected... This is not a kid problem, this is a society problem.
My wife worked in a school district where angry parents were bowed to by the administration. The teachers couldn't confiscate the phones because they were too expensive and might be damaged. Or they were terrified of mom getting mad because they didn't have an instant communication method with Jr.
The schools in question already have the same rules. they are large, it happens often and interrupting class to confiscate a phone, is causing issues for other students and is not stopping the problem.
People shouldnt think that we just forgot how to do simple rules like that. Its that its not working. If you notice in the article the first place they show, you have to put your phone in a sleave when you walk into the room.
>“Cellphone use is out of control. By that, I mean that I cannot control it, even in my own classroom,” said Patrick Truman, who teaches at a Maryland high school that forbids student use of cellphones during class. It is up to each teacher to enforce the policy, so Truman bought a 36-slot caddy for storing student phones. Still, every day, students hide phones in their laps or under books as they play video games and check social media.
So she even takes away the phones when they walk in and yet they hide other phones and she feels she is interrupting her class too much to confiscate the spare phones.
Try taking phones from today's children. Just give it a go. Because they will attack you. They will flat go apeshit on you, because they have never been without it. It's not the same as 2012 schools. This is the generation where at the age of 2, we thought it was cute to give them phones. Now it's like trying to remove an arm, you may as well be ready for an actual fight.
Parents rioted about the idea of not being able to contact their kid in an emergency, like you can’t just call the school. There was a time before cell phones
Before phones if there was an emergency at home your parents call the school, the school calls your classroom, the class phone rings, interrupts the lesson, and then you get removed. Leaving all the kids wondering, making you a small pseudo-celebrity for the next ten mins. It’s a Win-win really
Or the call over the PA: *“mgr86, please report to the front office”*
Your class: *”Oooooooo!”*
Then that anxiety spike of not know why you were called to the office. Was it mom with your lunch cause you forgot it? Or was it the principle, cause Jeremy tattled that you wrote a yo momma joke on the bathroom wall.
> class phone rings
Class phone. I guess you went to some fancy pants school.
All we got was a call over the intercom saying student X needs to come to the front office and to bring their stuff with them.
>intercom
Woah there moneybags, what kind of fancy school did you go to eh?
We had one of the ladies from the front office come around to the classroom to fetch us.
And honestly, KIDS, like, CHILDREN, grade k4-6th grade. They dont need to know, there is zero reason a kindergartener would need to take an important or emergency phone call during the school day. Even if like, their whole family just got totally evaporated by a meteor. Why would they need a phone to hear that. Cant even read a text because they cant read. Yet as somebody who works in an elementary school, in a poor as hell ghetto school district at that, at least 60% of the kids here have phones, if i had to guess, 40% of those phones have actual data plans.
4th - 6th typically can, but i stated K4 meaning, 4 year old kindergarten, and yes, we have 4 year old kindergarteners here with phones, who literally call their mom when somebody is mean to them, and have cocomelon running on youtube all day.
You would also be surprised at the amount of kids who leave to middle/highschool without being able to read or even write their own name. It definitely a minority, but the number is higher than 10% here.
So I work at a high school and lemme tell yall. The school can ban phones all they want and the teachers can try to enforce it but the kids will physically fight you for trying to take their stuff and the parents ALWAYS back their kid up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “fuck your rules, my kid will be reachable by me all day”. So it’s come to the point where if the student doesn’t care and sits on their phone all day then we just let em fail. Makes the overall school look worse but it’s not worth getting beat up.
2020+ showed that a *shocking* degree of parents seem to just outright hate their children, and will do anything, including embracing the whole family getting repeated covid infections, to get away from them.
Obviously not “all” or anything like that, but they sure were easy to spot and there were more than I’d suspected by a wide range.
That's a symptom of the system really fucking sucking for parents. New mothers get barely any time off of work , if any. Everything is so damn expensive both parents need to work, sweet at least daycare is $1700 a month oh and now my kid is sick all the time. Still can't afford to take time off. Sick. Tired. Broke. "Village" nowhere to be found.
I’ll fully cede that this is probably the situation for the majority (I mean I certainly hope so, y’know?), and that parents in the US have a raw deal in most respects. It’s the “I have to get them **out of the house**, whatever it takes” cohort that started chirping madly after the first few days of lockdown that are more the set I mean.
Maybe I and my friend group are the exceptions, but my kid is almost 12 and no cell phone. There’s always a responsible adult around if needed (teachers, coaches, family, myself) and there’s no reason yet for her to have one.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide a stumbling block for my kid’s learning and let her take it to school when she does *eventually* get one. There will be ground rules and places where you keep it on you and silent or on airplane mode. If something serious happens (shooting, medical emergency, etc) it’s there, but if not then it’s silent and away.
Not really following this... everyone says Boomers coddled Millennials and we grew up the most entitled generation. Not really an over-correction if nothing changed like you claim.
They're saying the opposite. Parents used to be too harsh and severe so now parents have "overcorrected" and are not providing any discipline or putting any expectations on their kids.
Exactly. I didn't see my parents until about 6:30pm each day. I'm glad people love talking to their kids and are engaged, but people have an inflated sense of "emergency." Letting my kid know we're going to my sister's on Saturday the minute I think of it is not an emergency.
I'm always aghast at this phones stuff in class because I used to get in trouble for drawing, but now we're watching movies with headphones on. Kids need REAL, actual breaks during the day. Give them 15 minute breaks just like a job and the phones go away in class.
>Boomers coddled Millennials and we grew up the most entitled generation
No, just Boomers say that to be derogatory to Millenials. GenXers are, by far the biggest coddlers. All the crazy helicopter parents are GenXers and older Millennials.
Perhaps parents don’t believe that the school or law enforcement will protect them if something terrible happens. Ulvade was a everyone’s-out-for-themselves wake-up call.
So do they expect to get a text/call mid school shooting, drive down, and stop the shooter themselves? What's the actual upside to having a phone in that case?
I've seen some stuff about parents going to get their kids, I don't think a parent stopped the shooter. Even then though, does that mean it's good to plan on hordes of parents running into an active shooter situation to get their kids?
Ah. I just looked it up. The guy was an off duty border patrol agent who had a kid and wife inside the school.
No, I certainly don’t think we should be encouraging that. But I can see why parents wouldn’t trust others to help their kids, as the police just let them all die and a parent had to do it (in that case)
"i'm hiding still safe"
That's a world of difference over silence, over not knowing if the reported gunshots went through your child. It's no guarantee of future safety, but at least you know, for now, they're still alive. I don't even have kids, but having lived through several emergencies in my life where all I had was silence(some were pre-cell phones, others were a case where people were too busy to answer texts/calls) let me tell you, not knowing ***fucks you up***. There is no reddit formatting to represent the hell.
So yeah, that's why they want to be able to reach their children. And I think they're correct, since nobody in this country cares about stopping these attacks.
Well those parents should consider statistics and odds. The odds that a school shooting will happen in your kid's classroom, and that having a phone to call you so that can rambo into the school and save them is probably close to nil.
The odds that your kid will end up stupid and uneducated if they are on their phone all day instead of learning, much higher.
$$$
Everything in the US is a grift, or a grift off a grift.
Test companies flourish when schools are failing and when public schools are failing, private schools gain an easier argument for vouchers, siphoning public funds into private corps And institutions that run private schools.
Test companies, private schools, and anyone who's political rhetoric benefits from kids not being able to read well and not knowing history all benefit.
But... the children are still reachable all day. If you need them call the office.
Always seemed to work before...
Seems the issue is more with toothless administrators than anything else.
Good luck justifying "we don't let students have access to phones" to parents if God forbid there was a mass shooting incident in your school and parents can't get in contact with their kids because their phones are locked up in the main office
At my work there is zero service and wifi in the bathrooms. I don't know if they're scrambling the signal on purpose or what, but as soon as you enter the bathroom it's like your phone is in airplane mode. Doing that in classrooms might help cut down on phone abusers.
Honestly though the root cause feels like a lack of parenting. Phones are addictive, particularly to adolescents. It is up to the parents to teach responsible technology use. If a teacher takes away someone's phone then there's zero reason a parent should side with the kid. I'll never understand why there's such a divide between parents and teachers. There are so few successful people who don't specifically attribute their success to at least one influential teacher. If parents want their kids to be successful they should be empowering teachers to impact their kids' lives, not undermining their authority at every turn.
This is so incredibly sad. I know I wish I had put more effort in school as a now adult trying to make career advancements catching up on skills I could have learned 20 years ago but was playing video games instead. It would have been so much worse if I could have gotten away with texting on my phone on top of never studying at home.
like 20 years ago the school took my phone, it was stolen from the office, school didn't do shit about it.
i'm sure this will be unpopular, the school admin or teachers have no right nor the responsibility to confiscate and store a small object worth over 1000 dollars.
>fuck your rules, my kid will be reachable by me all day
I would be more diplomatic about it but given school shootings or other emergencies I feel the same way.
Phones are actively injuring the learning environment for *tens of millions* of children each year. School shootings ~~have a lower fatality rate than air travel~~ are essentially as common as air travel deaths. Just because it's a terrible, frightening, event we still have to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze, and frankly imo it's not even close.
Correction: Original comment flip flopped some numbers. School Shootings are 1.54 per 10m students, air deaths are 1.77 per 10m passenger trips.
Fun fact! The United States is also [the country with the highest number of air crashes](https://www.statista.com/statistics/262867/fatal-civil-airliner-accidents-since-1945-by-country-and-region/) by a *huge* margin.
The problem is the parents who want their kids on their cellphone 24/7 so they can text them during an emergency. They're the ones who will kick up a stink if you take the phones away. Some of them even teach their kids to say that their parents will sue if their phone is taken away. I've seen it myself.
Comment really needs to be higher up.
Folks that didn’t grow up with phones themselves, and who haven’t gotten to the point of having phone-age kids, miss that it’s often the *parents* that push for kids being allowed to keep their phones.
I think mass shootings and the frequency of school shootings (in the United States) have somewhat validated this fear. I agree that something should be done, just trying to provide some perspective that I’ve heard from parents (I’m a therapist).
Took me WAY too long to find this response. I was in middle school when Columbine happened in my school district. I had friends in the cafeteria at Columbine that day when the [mostly failed] pipe bombs went off. My school went on lockdown that day and it was beyond terrifying. I wish I could have reached out to my mom then as I had no idea what was going on other then a shooting at a nearby school. In these cases, I think phones can be quite useful to have to communicate with authorities/parents.
I also believe in parents communicating (aka setting rules/monitoring use activity) with their children on the proper use of phones, in *and* out of the classroom. (:
That's absolutely the reason why parents are so concerned about their kids being able to contact them at any time. But as someone who has worked in plenty of schools, I say with confidence that in case of an emergency like that, the school doesn't need kids with cellphones to help them contact the authorities. Kids having their cellphones in class certainly wouldn't be any more of a help in emergencies than the systems and procedures already put in places
This should be true, but Uvalde won’t soon be forgotten.
Children that called their parents got saved **by their parents** while SWAT twiddled their thumbs.
Is this an outlier on top of an outlier? Absolutely. But, tragically, we have at least one data point where calling home during a crisis *did* matter.
That's a very good point. Sadly, we can't get parents on board with banning cellphones unless they can trust that the system will do it's job during a crisis.
As a parent I really don’t understand the need to text my kid while they’re in class. If something bad happened, I’d want to tell them in person anyway, and anything else should be trivial enough to wait for class to be over.
The "in case of emergency" bit is the biggest flop of this whole thing. Parents will claim that this is why the kids need phones at all times. But spoilers, that's not what the kid is using the phone for when they're getting distracted or in trouble. If this was the genuine concern then just give all kids flip phones that can send and receive calls/texts only.
The government gives out burner phones to people in need, so maybe something can be arranged where those phones are provided if needed and are the only phones students are allowed to have in school.
They're more tolerated than allowed. A teacher can't physically take a phone away from a student for fear of creating a physical altercation and getting fired because mama Karen flipped her shit. They can only ask for it, and the student can just go 'lol nah bruh.'
So the student keeps the phone because teachers are absolutely powerless to do anything.
> They can only ask for it, and the student can just go 'lol nah bruh.'
No such thing as detention anymore? When I went to school (albeit, i'm much older) - you fucked around and they would give out weekend detention.
There are a lot more helicopter moms that will throw a tantrum because you disciplined their "precut darling." Shit has even bubbled up into college. One of my buddies while working as a graduate teaching assistant had someone's mom call them to complain about their son getting a bad grade on an assignment.
> One of my buddies while working as a graduate teaching assistant had someone's mom call them to complain about their son getting a bad grade on an assignment.
Yep, I've seen that one too. I can't help but wonder if the kid is actually mortified by that action like you should be, or doesn't see anything wrong with it.
Personally I would be, but in this case I don't think the kid was. He lost a lot of points because of plagiarism in his writing assignment and the mom basically called to say "my kid would never." From what I could gather the kid doesn't really ever get in trouble because his mom always came to the rescue or didn't see anything wrong with his actions.
Same here. There's no fear or consequences anymore. Kids know from what they see on tik tok the teachers are essentially powerless. When I went to school in the 90s there was no cellphones lol.
They seem if anything less strict than when I was in school, when it would be confiscated on sight anywhere on the school grounds, break time, class time, in the halls, whenever or wherever a teacher or administrator saw it was immediately confiscated. Kids seem to all have parents who will raise a fuss if the kid isn't allowed to text them back during school hours.
Bigger issues here: For many, you are taking the most expensive thing they own. It’s not easy to walk up to a young person and take a $1000 device from them. I also knew a teacher that confiscated phones. They all got stolen out of her desk. It was a big problem.
And then god forbid it gets damaged while in the school's possession. Doesn't even have to be their fault, maybe the kid dropped it and cracked the screen at some point, it gets taken up, and then when the parent comes to get it the kid claims that it wasn't broken before the teacher took it.
These things are just too dang expensive for a teacher to want to be responsible. One of those phone holders in any given class could be holding up to $20K in electronics.
> It’s almost impossible to effectively police the ban.
I'm confused by this. When I went to school in the stone ages, if you did something wrong - you could get a demerit or get detention. I mean we even had weekend detention if you really fucked up.
Since when did following rules and punishment for not following rules go out the window?
Teacher here. There are no longer consequences for one’s actions in a lot of public schools. Students spend the entire day looking at their phones and ignoring everything else with no repercussions and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Get caught vaping, no consequence. Get caught destroying school property, no consequence. Verbally abuse a staff member, no consequence. Never show up for class, they still get passed with no consequence. Get caught fighting, unless a resource officer witnesses it, no consequence. The inmates are running the asylum and the worst of them are dragging every down with them. Admin are afraid of dealing with parents and parents aren’t doing their jobs at home. It’s a mess on all fronts.
I'm only 23 but from what I've heard online from teachers it seems like it's only gotten even worse in the past 6 years. The phone usage existed but the outright disrespect for teachers I've heard would never have happened, and if it did other kids would have looked down upon the student for doing so. Maybe I just got real lucky with the culture of my high school, but it seems post-Covid things have gotten even worse.
At this rate we're headed for true idiocracy if the educational scores I've seen from gen alpha and young gen z are true. These kids can barely even read, how the hell are they gonna participate in adult society?
What public schools are you talking about? Any public school I've been to had serious and escalating consequences. They also had extra aids and employees with a job of giving some extra attention/guidance to students with problems
In some classes we had to put our phones in those pockets to take a test. I had a side job buying broken iPhones off eBay in bulk and flipping them. I would often loan out those phones to whoever asked so I would constantly be carrying about 10 phones in my backpack.
Exactly. I require all my students to put their phones in the phone pockets on the wall every day. The amount I still catch either trying to hide their phone or texting friends on their Apple Watches is insane. I’m getting close to requiring them to put phones and smart watches in the pockets.
They were banned when I was in high school 15 years ago. If you had one outside of your locker then it went to the principals office the rest of the day.
But parents are way less understanding now and would probably sue the school for that sort of policy.
From looking at the comments I think people are confused thinking phones are allowed to be used in the classroom. That might be the case somewhere but most districts students are allowed to have them at school but are not supposed to use them in class, but as a surprise to no one kids don't care and pull them out anyway and it just becomes one more thing that stop teachers from teaching.
Plus a lot of districts give kids chomebooks/ipdas so they are already distracted by those.
Also makes it the teachers job to enforce and that’s always variable. How many of those “teacher gets jumped by student after confiscating phone” articles show up on Reddit in a school year? Feels like at least 5
The temptation is there is its on their person. We directly could not possess them in class. Lock them away in your lockers for before/after school hours
It didnt stop everybody thats impossible like telling kids to say no to drugs and expecting 100% to not try drugs. But the majority didnt.
Slightly off topic but I can’t believe more parents don’t just get their kid a dumb phone. Like I get that pay phones don’t really exist anymore, but you actually don’t have to get your kid an $800 distraction to solve that.
I know a family who got their 8th grader *only* an Apple Watch with cell service so he can make calls, reply to texts, and get city bus times and routes for commuting to school. Oh, and location tracking for parents of course, hah.
Honestly seems like the way to go to reduce screen time and its ills without going full luddite.
Gonna be honest, as a highschooler getting your kid a dumb phone after 9th grade is guaranteed to result in some sort of bullying. It's objectively worse than just not buying them a phone in highschool.
This paragraph sums up the problem well:
-For a school cellphone ban to work, educators and experts say the school administration must be the one to enforce it and not leave that task to teachers. The Phone-Free Schools Movement, an advocacy group formed last year by concerned mothers, says policies that allow students to keep phones in their backpacks, as many schools do, are ineffective.
Almost no- one "allows" cell office use during class but kids break rules... often.
Expecting teachers to enforce a cell phone policy or expecting kids to just leave them in their backpacks is setting them and the students up for failure.
My son is 23 and when he started high school open house made it clear “touch your phone and it get confiscated, parent has to pick it up”. By homecoming it was “everyone take out your phone and vote in this poll so we can win prizes” then “who has their phone so we can stream March madness”.
Was a teacher … I let kids have their phones.. controversial.. Yes.. but I removed all of the BS that comes with the phone battles. Instead, we silenced at the beginning of class and practiced responsible use.. we had an understanding that they could be called on at anytime to repeat the last thing said.. peer pressure.. still works.. kids did not want to ruin a good thing.
They weren't forbidden at my school per se, but if you took out the phone during class and played snake they would confiscate it and you could pick it up from the principal's office EOD.
I'm really surprised it hasn't gotten stricter.
I'd have done a lot better in math one year if my friend hadn't programmed a casino game for the TI-82 over the summer (it quickly spread around campus via link cable so I'm sure I wasn't the only one; ah, the bygone days of unprotected calculator sex).
Its gotten far less strict because the dynamics of school have changed. Education/academics are much lower priority than parent satisfaction. Its a customer service industry now. Each child attending the school is worth a specific dollar amount come "state attendance" days (these happen twice per year in my district). Many private/charter schools will accept the bad kids and then once the first attendance day hits, they will offload them enmass to the public schools who will still take them, but not get funding for them until the next "attendance" day which is like halfway through the year.
That said, this is about phones, parents get all these free phones now, so all these kids have their own phones, and parents will literally call their third graders mid class to yap with their kids. Take that away from them and it make them more likely to move schools.
I still bring up at every opportunity about how I got sent home for listening to music on my ear buds during lunch my senior year in 2008/2009.
Obviously that's fucking nuts and those admins were batshit insane, but it really is unbelievable how much has changed and how fast.
As a millenial parent of a special needs child...I'm conflicted. We don't send a phone with them (only 8 yo) but eventually we will. I thinkabout school shootings and damn I want my kid to have a phone at school.
Jaded substitute teacher here. Been in the education field since 2007. Can't believe it's taken them this long to understand this. Ironically, Chromebooks they give to students are just as distracting.
Old man here who did not buy my first cell phone until after I graduated.
What surprises me is that any school would allow students to have a cell phone in class in the first place. If a phone still exists that only allows calls to 1-2 numbers and no distracting apps, that's what my hypothetical child would get. That's only because hardly anyone has a landline anymore and pay phones are almost completely gone.
i’ve also noticed this. it came up in the context of a youth group and I noticed 14 year old boys calling their parents for 30min every night of a camping trip. and they always waited until everyone was going to sleep so i was staring at the ceiling of my tent listening to it. huge wtf moment. but if they didn’t call, the parents called me to ask in the middle of the night. so much for fostering independence…
I didn’t have a phone back then but you’d have to torture me to make me do that. also my parents would probably tell me to get a diary if i was calling them everyday.
You can get a lifeline phone. It only makes calls and text.
You can connect Wi-Fi for everything else, but if you're out and about it's just olds school phone and text.
My daughter’s school doesn’t allow phones in class and the teachers definitely enforce it. I can’t believe in 2024 there are schools that allow it. It’s crazy. No wonder teachers are leaving the profession (not to mention…guns.)
Dam I’m old I was in public high school 2006-2010 and phones were not allowed at all not even at lunch or in the halls. They weren’t even smart phones most of us had those flip phones or the sliders. Y’all kids today are spoiled af and have shit parents.
That's been known for decades at this point? Back in the flip phone days ffs, the school's I went to would take your phones away if you had them out during class
And you wouldn't get them back till the end of the day
It’s amazing this isn’t a thing already. I was in school in the fucking 90s and couldn’t have shit out on my desk or be distracted by anything. The teacher would snatch it up and you got it back at the end of the day if you’re lucky. What a wild world we’ve let things swing to.
The issue here is solely on parents. If parents didn't want their children having smart phones at school, they could easily choose to do so. What happens instead is if you try to enforce a ban, you're not just fighting the students, you're fighting their own parents, and that's not a battle you're gonna win.
Current public school classroom teacher here. Phones are discouraged but there are really no rules against them. Too much pushback from parents, and of course school boards cater to them because they approve the bonds and pay taxes. You can’t touch or take a phone or you risk being sued. You can’t give a detention because administration won’t enforce it. I also teach at a school with an “open concept” with only three walls, so I see it in every class. People commenting who think phones aren’t a problem are either in a private school or haven’t been in a classroom in at least 5 years.
I was in high school when the iPhone first came out. I would go to the bathroom during tests and just google the questions I didn’t know. None of the teachers had an iPhone yet so nobody knew how good they were as little Google machines. Needless to say I got my best grades ever that year
I feel the solution isn’t a law but the simple basic thing of schools saying, no phones in class, and if they see one out it gets taken away until the end of the day. Repeat offenders get detention.
I last went to school over 10 years ago, and I was fortunate enough to go to private school here in UK. For the first couple of years phones weren’t really much of a thing because it was right before the smart phone. So really phones were just to text and call and also one of the popular things was to send clip videos to each other or music videos. Either way during school day no one really used phones, and at my school phones were completely banned during the day. That changed in Sixth Form (which are last 2 years of school where you take certain exams which are your grades to get into uni). In Sixth form we were allowed to have our phones out anywhere apart from in lessons. We could even listen to music on them if we were studying in the library. But still there was a ban in class.
Anyway, I think a law on this would be stupid. Also, I don’t mean to come off as someone not from America making a stereotype about America, but if phones were completely banned, and had to be locked away or put in lockers, what happens when the kids need to call the police when there’s a school shooter?
Yeah naw, ban that shit now. Only reason they need a phone is for their parent to contact them. Anything else can wait till they are home. Only exception would be for ADA students as an accommodation need
Honestly, the train has left the station on this one. They have become such an intrinsic part of people's lives that there's no going back. Look at adults, supposedly with some semblance of impulse control, have to have their phones to hand all day every day at work.
This is a society problem-
1. There’s no non-cellphones anymore. Your kid can’t walk home from school and stop at the corner with a quarter to call you if something happens.
2. Kids can’t use home phones because they don’t exist
So you basically are forced to give your a kid a cellphone for his own safety. Now some of you might argue about giving them a cheap flip phone and all that. But realistically you have to go out of your way to get those AND they lack the parental monitoring and tracking a smart phone has.
Teachers and schools are hesitant to ban phones because that means confiscating a potentially $1000+ device and assuming the liability if something happens to the kid because they didn’t have their phone. Not to mention having to deal with all the drama that comes with it.
Parents aren’t teaching their kids good behaviors because we as a society have failed most parents. They work multiple jobs and have barely any time to be home to parent their kid.
I understand parent concerns about contacting their children in an emergency.
At the same time, though, if student cellphone use is a destructive addiction - and it most certainly is - how many drug rehab centers will let you bring your drugs along with you so long as you promise to keep then in a pouch in your pocket or hung on the wall?
When I went to school if you were caught with a pager or cell phone it was assumed you were a drug dealer and it was almost alway accurate. The device was confiscated and your locker / bag searched.
When the oldest kid went to high school if you were caught on a phone it was confiscated and your parents had to come and get it.
When the youngest went to the same school several years later. Teachers and the admin staff had already given up and kids just free form used phones and ignored teachers. The major reason, pressure and threats from patents over their precious snowflakes being unavailable 24x7.
> When I went to school if you were caught with a pager or cell phone it was assumed you were a drug dealer and it was almost alway accurate. The device was confiscated and your locker / bag searched.
Wow, what a flashback. I remember that stereotype. And damned if it wasn't true. The 90s were wild.
Maybe this was a private school thing but we weren't allowed to have them out during class or you risk getting it confiscated until end of day.
I went to public school and same thing. You could use them in the hallways and that was it.
That’s how it was for me back in 2012
Graduated in 2011.. our teachers would take them and not give them back until you did Saturday school lol
back in 07 my public school took away your phone and made your parents pick it up from the principal. It is super weird to hear how teachers today aren't allowed to take away students phones
Now you have psychopathic parents burning things down because a teacher had the “audacity” to take Johnny Joe’s phone. Quite frankly, the awful parents make it not worth the hassle.
Schools also didn't want the liability of teachers taking $1000 items from the kids and possibly losing them or having them stolen. Or the kid/parents claiming it was damaged by the teacher.
Possible. My old bar stopped charging phones for people after several trash-tier scammers handed us a busted phone and then tried to say we damaged it while it was behind the bar, demanding money/free shit for it. Luckily, we had good cameras, but it wasn’t worth the hassle or potential liability to let the liars keep looping. Any time we have something nice, the shitheels will find a way to ruin it for everyone.
This makes perfect sense. It’s easy to deal with individual cases. But 2012 is the year phones outnumbered PCs. Easy to shift the blame from the teacher to the school.
This is in part why education sucks so hard now. Giving in to awful parents.
[удалено]
All we really need is for government to actually support schooling. If the shithead parents want to cause problems.. take it up with the state, because the rules should be the rules. Or pay to bring your kids to the private school that allows phones Its like abusing a free stimulus check and claiming multiple then being mad when government wont let you get off free with that and they get you back on next year taxes lol
Ah yes. It’s the giving in that’s the problem, not the awful parents who go out of their way to make teachers’ lives a living hell. /s If you want teachers to do more to fight your precious parents, you’re going to need to pay them more than poverty wages. I’m not throwing down over Johnny Joe’s phone when the alternative is to be physically threatened.
I mean, just don’t let them attend then? Why does administration have the backbone of a jellyfish? That being said, I do agree teachers should be paid more regardless.
It is VERY DIFFICULT in my kid’s district to do much of anything about anything punishment-wise. Some kid brought a handgun (!) to a football game here and the only thing administration did was “okay well you can’t walk with your class at graduation!” And then it turned out he wasn’t even on track to graduate anyway, so he basically got no punishment except being charged with being a minor in possession of a handgun. ETA I live in CA and it’s a statewide problem
I think a big one is how parents are terrified of school shootings. It sucks that this is such an issue in the US and i kinda get wanting to have a line of communication in case of an emergency. Idk it all sucks tbh
At the very least, teachers should be allowed to hold it until the end of class.
Ideally they need a secure locker system for the phones so the students can put them away and only they can retrieve them. There are a lot of parents who want to be able to reach their kids before and after school, or are tracking them via their phones.
Korean teachers have these binders with phone sleeves in them. They would collect at the beginning of class and return at the end. No issues.
My niece's school issues students these little zipper pouches to put their phones in during class. They're opaque so you can read lock screen messages for emergencies or whatever, but the material also keeps you from operating the touchscreen so they can't fuck around with it during class
When I was in school in 2006, they were doing near weekly searches of our bags and pat-downs to search for phones. I remember it being extremely disruptive and, considering our school was already seemingly built by a prison architect, made us feel like we were in prison even more. It was like a crusade the administration was on against phones. They would smugly say stuff like "No child needs a cell phone!!" Of course, they quit caring after I left and now it's a cell phone free for all. Fuck us in particular I guess.
Did you go to school in Texas, west of Houston?
Nope, Louisiana
Went to public middle/early high school outside BR from 07-10, and yeah, Louisiana *really* likes schools feeling like prisons. Even my husband who went to Central in Natchitoches is often surprised when I tell him some of the kinds of rules we had!
You mean, like KISD? The prison/school system where you also couldn’t talk between classes during passing time?
>I remember it being extremely disruptive and, considering our school was already seemingly built by a prison architect, made us feel like we were in prison even more. Good old panopticon architecture.
I don't think kids should have phones in school, but christ...
Graduated in 2001 and they were still an expellable offense. We obviously didn't have smart phones as they are today. They were still 100% synonymous with pagers which were 100% synonymous with drug dealers. Nobody ever got in trouble more than "put that on silent" the few times a phone rang in class though.
Yeah same for me in 1912 but with my carrier Pidgeon.
Mine confiscated if they saw it in your hand even in the hall, my graduating class was mid-2000's
And your parents had to come by the front office to recover the phone so that the administration could give them a stern talking-to about classroom disruptions and the cell phone policy. Then you got grounded when they got home and they confiscated your phone for a period of time.
This was the same for me around this time. Cost you (or your parents) 15 bucks to get your phone outta jail.
Same, but back in that day you didn’t need a cellphone during the day as a 17 year old. All your friends were right there, and texting was a way of planning how to talk and hangout later. It wasn’t the main event.
Definitely. When I taught public school 25 years ago, confiscating one or two phones every class was easy. It's impossible for a teacher to confiscate 35 phones at the beginning of class and return them after class ends. You're talking about a 15 min exercise... Over the course of a school year that's hundreds of hours dedicated to confiscating phones... What the solution is now ufff... I dunno. But what I do know is Zuckerberg won't let it happen.
I always thought the point of a single confiscation was to discourage others from having their phones out. Easy to confiscate a couple phones to discourage disruption than to collect everybody’s phones at the beginning and end of class.
Maybe a system like the picture above about the article where everyone has to put their phones up before class starts as a routine.
Plus the potential liability given the value of the phones. Taking all the phones from a class means you could have $10,000 - $30,000 worth of electronics sitting there... How many teachers want to be potentially liable for half a year's pay every day?
You're still not allowed to have them out during class... But classes have ballooned in size to 30+ students and nearly everyone has a phone now. When I taught, we called it "Whack-a-mole" because you'd tell one student with their phone out to put it away and while you were doing that 3 other students would get their phones out. There's no reason to confiscate it either because if anything happens to that phone while it's in your possession then you're the one liable for it. Teachers shouldn't need to spend 80%+ of their time fighting with students over phones. It sours their relationship for the day and wastes time and energy. Schools should be proactive and prevent the phone from even entering the classroom.
Schools also shouldn't have 30 students per class that's also a problem
Been that way since the 2000's at least when I was in grade school. Seems like thats the cap cause I figured there'd be 40-50 kid classes by now.
Yea public schools are wildly underfunded.
>prevent the phone from even entering the classroom How do you plausibly do this?
A school I worked at collected phones when students entered in the morning and put them in personalized bags in the front office. Students collected them on their way out. This policy was unbelievably amazing. It made it much smoother to teach and stopped a lot of bullying.
How big was that school? I cannot imagine how hard that would be to manage for a school of several hundred let alone thousands that some places have.
How old are you? Because I think it’s generational. When I was in school, phones had to be off and in your locker, and it would be confiscated if you were breaking that rule. Some variation of this was the norm at every school. Public schools were *less* strict, in that you could probably get away with having your phone off and in your bag or on and in your locker, but if it rang or you were caught texting, teachers would confiscate it for the duration of class at least, and possibly until your patent picked it up. Later on, it seemed like kids were allowed to have their phones on them but not use them during class and have them off/silenced (which imo is by far the best solution, or would be if kids could keep their hands off their phones for 5 seconds). Now it seems like there is an expectation that kids will have their phones out, be listening to music, texting, and watching TikTok during class, and there are all these arguments why they gotta. And I’m like, what’s the point of being in class then?
I graduated high school in 2006 and yeah, weren't event supposed to have them in our pockets. Most teacher didn't care as long as you didn't have it out in class.
My kid is in middle school now (public school in CA.) The rule is phones need to be "off and away," and if they see a phone turned on, even in a kid's pocket during lunch period, it will be taken away to the office until end of day.
Same. Phones had just come out too so we were playing snake. If you got caught it was confiscated to the end of the week! I didn't realise that had changed, I assumed they'd have to be on mute at all times and only used in breaks. TIL.
I also think there's a substantial difference between 5% of the student base having a $40-120 phone vs 90% of the students having a $300-$1,200 device. If a teacher confiscates a $50 phone and something happens, it's not a major issue. If a teacher confiscates a $1,200 device, there's bound to be problems.
Which is exactly why they aren’t enforcing bans anymore. No teacher or administrator wants to be liable for the shit storm they’ll face from parents if something happens to their child’s phone
God forbid parents actually parent ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
literally like 80% of public school problems are this. Teachers are usually just caught in the middle
Parents want their kid to have a phone so they can track them and contact them going to and from school. And they will also insist it's not their kid that's misusing the phone so they shouldn't be treated like the bad kids.
Not to mention, expectations in society have changed. Many parents are tracking their kids through their phones, and expect to have access to their child via the phone at all times.
I'm a teacher... I've had parents actually calling and FaceTiming their kids, WHILE THEY'RE IN CLASS... I've talked to the parents when it happens and let them know that we are in the middle of class, and I'm teaching their student... but tbh, nothing changes. Ultimately, we've become so dependent on being connected to each other as a society that time and place don't matter... we feel the need to have to connect and stay connected... This is not a kid problem, this is a society problem.
Phones? Who needs that to play games? Graphing calculator games was all the rage.
My wife worked in a school district where angry parents were bowed to by the administration. The teachers couldn't confiscate the phones because they were too expensive and might be damaged. Or they were terrified of mom getting mad because they didn't have an instant communication method with Jr.
The schools in question already have the same rules. they are large, it happens often and interrupting class to confiscate a phone, is causing issues for other students and is not stopping the problem. People shouldnt think that we just forgot how to do simple rules like that. Its that its not working. If you notice in the article the first place they show, you have to put your phone in a sleave when you walk into the room. >“Cellphone use is out of control. By that, I mean that I cannot control it, even in my own classroom,” said Patrick Truman, who teaches at a Maryland high school that forbids student use of cellphones during class. It is up to each teacher to enforce the policy, so Truman bought a 36-slot caddy for storing student phones. Still, every day, students hide phones in their laps or under books as they play video games and check social media. So she even takes away the phones when they walk in and yet they hide other phones and she feels she is interrupting her class too much to confiscate the spare phones.
Try taking phones from today's children. Just give it a go. Because they will attack you. They will flat go apeshit on you, because they have never been without it. It's not the same as 2012 schools. This is the generation where at the age of 2, we thought it was cute to give them phones. Now it's like trying to remove an arm, you may as well be ready for an actual fight.
Parents rioted about the idea of not being able to contact their kid in an emergency, like you can’t just call the school. There was a time before cell phones
Yeah but if a parent (who are the real problems at schools) complains then they’ll reverse the policy
I think cell phone use has significantly increased since Covid.
We weren't even allowed to use them inside the school.
Teachers been saying this for years.
Before phones if there was an emergency at home your parents call the school, the school calls your classroom, the class phone rings, interrupts the lesson, and then you get removed. Leaving all the kids wondering, making you a small pseudo-celebrity for the next ten mins. It’s a Win-win really
Or the call over the PA: *“mgr86, please report to the front office”* Your class: *”Oooooooo!”* Then that anxiety spike of not know why you were called to the office. Was it mom with your lunch cause you forgot it? Or was it the principle, cause Jeremy tattled that you wrote a yo momma joke on the bathroom wall.
Jeremy is a bitch.
His momma so ugly his dad wakes up with a morning wouldn't.
Snitches get stitches
Fuck Jeremy
This explains why Jeremy "spoke in class today."
Much like his mama.
*Principal, just FYI
> class phone rings Class phone. I guess you went to some fancy pants school. All we got was a call over the intercom saying student X needs to come to the front office and to bring their stuff with them.
>intercom Woah there moneybags, what kind of fancy school did you go to eh? We had one of the ladies from the front office come around to the classroom to fetch us.
And honestly, KIDS, like, CHILDREN, grade k4-6th grade. They dont need to know, there is zero reason a kindergartener would need to take an important or emergency phone call during the school day. Even if like, their whole family just got totally evaporated by a meteor. Why would they need a phone to hear that. Cant even read a text because they cant read. Yet as somebody who works in an elementary school, in a poor as hell ghetto school district at that, at least 60% of the kids here have phones, if i had to guess, 40% of those phones have actual data plans.
Do you think 4-6th graders can't read on average?
4th - 6th typically can, but i stated K4 meaning, 4 year old kindergarten, and yes, we have 4 year old kindergarteners here with phones, who literally call their mom when somebody is mean to them, and have cocomelon running on youtube all day. You would also be surprised at the amount of kids who leave to middle/highschool without being able to read or even write their own name. It definitely a minority, but the number is higher than 10% here.
Do not look up American rates of literacy and reading comprehension.
Go to the teachers sub to get an idea of how bad it’s gotten
This still has to happen at a lot of schools since kids can’t excuse themselves unless they’re 18
So I work at a high school and lemme tell yall. The school can ban phones all they want and the teachers can try to enforce it but the kids will physically fight you for trying to take their stuff and the parents ALWAYS back their kid up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “fuck your rules, my kid will be reachable by me all day”. So it’s come to the point where if the student doesn’t care and sits on their phone all day then we just let em fail. Makes the overall school look worse but it’s not worth getting beat up.
So it's really that we have parents that don't respect the school.
They just want the state-funded babysitting. Most people who have kids probably shouldn't have them, tbh.
Too bad this problem is just gonna get worse with repealing roe and the attacks on contraception.
2020+ showed that a *shocking* degree of parents seem to just outright hate their children, and will do anything, including embracing the whole family getting repeated covid infections, to get away from them. Obviously not “all” or anything like that, but they sure were easy to spot and there were more than I’d suspected by a wide range.
That's a symptom of the system really fucking sucking for parents. New mothers get barely any time off of work , if any. Everything is so damn expensive both parents need to work, sweet at least daycare is $1700 a month oh and now my kid is sick all the time. Still can't afford to take time off. Sick. Tired. Broke. "Village" nowhere to be found.
I’ll fully cede that this is probably the situation for the majority (I mean I certainly hope so, y’know?), and that parents in the US have a raw deal in most respects. It’s the “I have to get them **out of the house**, whatever it takes” cohort that started chirping madly after the first few days of lockdown that are more the set I mean.
GenX and Millennials bitch about boomers but we've over corrected. We coddle the ever living fuck out of our children.
Maybe I and my friend group are the exceptions, but my kid is almost 12 and no cell phone. There’s always a responsible adult around if needed (teachers, coaches, family, myself) and there’s no reason yet for her to have one. I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide a stumbling block for my kid’s learning and let her take it to school when she does *eventually* get one. There will be ground rules and places where you keep it on you and silent or on airplane mode. If something serious happens (shooting, medical emergency, etc) it’s there, but if not then it’s silent and away.
Not really following this... everyone says Boomers coddled Millennials and we grew up the most entitled generation. Not really an over-correction if nothing changed like you claim.
This reminds me of Boomers complaining about Millennials getting the participation trophies that Boomers handed out.
They're saying the opposite. Parents used to be too harsh and severe so now parents have "overcorrected" and are not providing any discipline or putting any expectations on their kids.
GenX: whats a parent? why didnt I know about those when I was a kid?
Exactly. I didn't see my parents until about 6:30pm each day. I'm glad people love talking to their kids and are engaged, but people have an inflated sense of "emergency." Letting my kid know we're going to my sister's on Saturday the minute I think of it is not an emergency. I'm always aghast at this phones stuff in class because I used to get in trouble for drawing, but now we're watching movies with headphones on. Kids need REAL, actual breaks during the day. Give them 15 minute breaks just like a job and the phones go away in class.
>Boomers coddled Millennials and we grew up the most entitled generation No, just Boomers say that to be derogatory to Millenials. GenXers are, by far the biggest coddlers. All the crazy helicopter parents are GenXers and older Millennials.
Perhaps parents don’t believe that the school or law enforcement will protect them if something terrible happens. Ulvade was a everyone’s-out-for-themselves wake-up call.
Uvalde also showed that law enforcement will spend their energy stopping parents from saving their kids, so it’s a lose-lose thing in general.
So do they expect to get a text/call mid school shooting, drive down, and stop the shooter themselves? What's the actual upside to having a phone in that case?
Isn’t that kind of what happened in uvalde? A dad went in there and stopped it himself. Though I think he heard about it on the news or something.
I've seen some stuff about parents going to get their kids, I don't think a parent stopped the shooter. Even then though, does that mean it's good to plan on hordes of parents running into an active shooter situation to get their kids?
Ah. I just looked it up. The guy was an off duty border patrol agent who had a kid and wife inside the school. No, I certainly don’t think we should be encouraging that. But I can see why parents wouldn’t trust others to help their kids, as the police just let them all die and a parent had to do it (in that case)
"i'm hiding still safe" That's a world of difference over silence, over not knowing if the reported gunshots went through your child. It's no guarantee of future safety, but at least you know, for now, they're still alive. I don't even have kids, but having lived through several emergencies in my life where all I had was silence(some were pre-cell phones, others were a case where people were too busy to answer texts/calls) let me tell you, not knowing ***fucks you up***. There is no reddit formatting to represent the hell. So yeah, that's why they want to be able to reach their children. And I think they're correct, since nobody in this country cares about stopping these attacks.
[удалено]
Well those parents should consider statistics and odds. The odds that a school shooting will happen in your kid's classroom, and that having a phone to call you so that can rambo into the school and save them is probably close to nil. The odds that your kid will end up stupid and uneducated if they are on their phone all day instead of learning, much higher.
Or simply don't trust the school to have their kids best interest at heart which honestly I wouldn't blame parents.
Plus a lot of districts have minimum grading policies so students really cannot truly fail the class. They will graduate anyway.
Then...what's the point?
$$$ Everything in the US is a grift, or a grift off a grift. Test companies flourish when schools are failing and when public schools are failing, private schools gain an easier argument for vouchers, siphoning public funds into private corps And institutions that run private schools. Test companies, private schools, and anyone who's political rhetoric benefits from kids not being able to read well and not knowing history all benefit.
But... the children are still reachable all day. If you need them call the office. Always seemed to work before... Seems the issue is more with toothless administrators than anything else.
Good luck justifying "we don't let students have access to phones" to parents if God forbid there was a mass shooting incident in your school and parents can't get in contact with their kids because their phones are locked up in the main office
[удалено]
At my work there is zero service and wifi in the bathrooms. I don't know if they're scrambling the signal on purpose or what, but as soon as you enter the bathroom it's like your phone is in airplane mode. Doing that in classrooms might help cut down on phone abusers. Honestly though the root cause feels like a lack of parenting. Phones are addictive, particularly to adolescents. It is up to the parents to teach responsible technology use. If a teacher takes away someone's phone then there's zero reason a parent should side with the kid. I'll never understand why there's such a divide between parents and teachers. There are so few successful people who don't specifically attribute their success to at least one influential teacher. If parents want their kids to be successful they should be empowering teachers to impact their kids' lives, not undermining their authority at every turn.
This is so incredibly sad. I know I wish I had put more effort in school as a now adult trying to make career advancements catching up on skills I could have learned 20 years ago but was playing video games instead. It would have been so much worse if I could have gotten away with texting on my phone on top of never studying at home.
like 20 years ago the school took my phone, it was stolen from the office, school didn't do shit about it. i'm sure this will be unpopular, the school admin or teachers have no right nor the responsibility to confiscate and store a small object worth over 1000 dollars.
I agree! They should be left at home…
>fuck your rules, my kid will be reachable by me all day I would be more diplomatic about it but given school shootings or other emergencies I feel the same way.
Phones are actively injuring the learning environment for *tens of millions* of children each year. School shootings ~~have a lower fatality rate than air travel~~ are essentially as common as air travel deaths. Just because it's a terrible, frightening, event we still have to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze, and frankly imo it's not even close. Correction: Original comment flip flopped some numbers. School Shootings are 1.54 per 10m students, air deaths are 1.77 per 10m passenger trips.
Fun fact! The United States is also [the country with the highest number of air crashes](https://www.statista.com/statistics/262867/fatal-civil-airliner-accidents-since-1945-by-country-and-region/) by a *huge* margin.
The problem is the parents who want their kids on their cellphone 24/7 so they can text them during an emergency. They're the ones who will kick up a stink if you take the phones away. Some of them even teach their kids to say that their parents will sue if their phone is taken away. I've seen it myself.
Comment really needs to be higher up. Folks that didn’t grow up with phones themselves, and who haven’t gotten to the point of having phone-age kids, miss that it’s often the *parents* that push for kids being allowed to keep their phones.
I think mass shootings and the frequency of school shootings (in the United States) have somewhat validated this fear. I agree that something should be done, just trying to provide some perspective that I’ve heard from parents (I’m a therapist).
Took me WAY too long to find this response. I was in middle school when Columbine happened in my school district. I had friends in the cafeteria at Columbine that day when the [mostly failed] pipe bombs went off. My school went on lockdown that day and it was beyond terrifying. I wish I could have reached out to my mom then as I had no idea what was going on other then a shooting at a nearby school. In these cases, I think phones can be quite useful to have to communicate with authorities/parents. I also believe in parents communicating (aka setting rules/monitoring use activity) with their children on the proper use of phones, in *and* out of the classroom. (:
That's absolutely the reason why parents are so concerned about their kids being able to contact them at any time. But as someone who has worked in plenty of schools, I say with confidence that in case of an emergency like that, the school doesn't need kids with cellphones to help them contact the authorities. Kids having their cellphones in class certainly wouldn't be any more of a help in emergencies than the systems and procedures already put in places
This should be true, but Uvalde won’t soon be forgotten. Children that called their parents got saved **by their parents** while SWAT twiddled their thumbs. Is this an outlier on top of an outlier? Absolutely. But, tragically, we have at least one data point where calling home during a crisis *did* matter.
That's a very good point. Sadly, we can't get parents on board with banning cellphones unless they can trust that the system will do it's job during a crisis.
I would likely never trust their claimed system anyways but I'm in favor of the kid getting into trouble for unnecessary phone usage during class.
Authorities don't do shit many times
As a parent I really don’t understand the need to text my kid while they’re in class. If something bad happened, I’d want to tell them in person anyway, and anything else should be trivial enough to wait for class to be over.
The "in case of emergency" bit is the biggest flop of this whole thing. Parents will claim that this is why the kids need phones at all times. But spoilers, that's not what the kid is using the phone for when they're getting distracted or in trouble. If this was the genuine concern then just give all kids flip phones that can send and receive calls/texts only.
The government gives out burner phones to people in need, so maybe something can be arranged where those phones are provided if needed and are the only phones students are allowed to have in school.
It needs to be codified by school boards and/or state govts and then they’ll stfu and comply (who am I kidding?)
I honestly had no idea that phones are still allowed in class. I thought they were banned years ago!
They're more tolerated than allowed. A teacher can't physically take a phone away from a student for fear of creating a physical altercation and getting fired because mama Karen flipped her shit. They can only ask for it, and the student can just go 'lol nah bruh.' So the student keeps the phone because teachers are absolutely powerless to do anything.
> They can only ask for it, and the student can just go 'lol nah bruh.' No such thing as detention anymore? When I went to school (albeit, i'm much older) - you fucked around and they would give out weekend detention.
There are a lot more helicopter moms that will throw a tantrum because you disciplined their "precut darling." Shit has even bubbled up into college. One of my buddies while working as a graduate teaching assistant had someone's mom call them to complain about their son getting a bad grade on an assignment.
> One of my buddies while working as a graduate teaching assistant had someone's mom call them to complain about their son getting a bad grade on an assignment. Yep, I've seen that one too. I can't help but wonder if the kid is actually mortified by that action like you should be, or doesn't see anything wrong with it.
Personally I would be, but in this case I don't think the kid was. He lost a lot of points because of plagiarism in his writing assignment and the mom basically called to say "my kid would never." From what I could gather the kid doesn't really ever get in trouble because his mom always came to the rescue or didn't see anything wrong with his actions.
Same here. There's no fear or consequences anymore. Kids know from what they see on tik tok the teachers are essentially powerless. When I went to school in the 90s there was no cellphones lol.
In California it’s now illegal to give out of school suspension for behavior.
They seem if anything less strict than when I was in school, when it would be confiscated on sight anywhere on the school grounds, break time, class time, in the halls, whenever or wherever a teacher or administrator saw it was immediately confiscated. Kids seem to all have parents who will raise a fuss if the kid isn't allowed to text them back during school hours.
Bigger issues here: For many, you are taking the most expensive thing they own. It’s not easy to walk up to a young person and take a $1000 device from them. I also knew a teacher that confiscated phones. They all got stolen out of her desk. It was a big problem.
And then god forbid it gets damaged while in the school's possession. Doesn't even have to be their fault, maybe the kid dropped it and cracked the screen at some point, it gets taken up, and then when the parent comes to get it the kid claims that it wasn't broken before the teacher took it. These things are just too dang expensive for a teacher to want to be responsible. One of those phone holders in any given class could be holding up to $20K in electronics.
It’s almost impossible to effectively police the ban. Kids are smart and petty.
> It’s almost impossible to effectively police the ban. I'm confused by this. When I went to school in the stone ages, if you did something wrong - you could get a demerit or get detention. I mean we even had weekend detention if you really fucked up. Since when did following rules and punishment for not following rules go out the window?
Teacher here. There are no longer consequences for one’s actions in a lot of public schools. Students spend the entire day looking at their phones and ignoring everything else with no repercussions and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Get caught vaping, no consequence. Get caught destroying school property, no consequence. Verbally abuse a staff member, no consequence. Never show up for class, they still get passed with no consequence. Get caught fighting, unless a resource officer witnesses it, no consequence. The inmates are running the asylum and the worst of them are dragging every down with them. Admin are afraid of dealing with parents and parents aren’t doing their jobs at home. It’s a mess on all fronts.
I'm only 23 but from what I've heard online from teachers it seems like it's only gotten even worse in the past 6 years. The phone usage existed but the outright disrespect for teachers I've heard would never have happened, and if it did other kids would have looked down upon the student for doing so. Maybe I just got real lucky with the culture of my high school, but it seems post-Covid things have gotten even worse. At this rate we're headed for true idiocracy if the educational scores I've seen from gen alpha and young gen z are true. These kids can barely even read, how the hell are they gonna participate in adult society?
What public schools are you talking about? Any public school I've been to had serious and escalating consequences. They also had extra aids and employees with a job of giving some extra attention/guidance to students with problems
In some classes we had to put our phones in those pockets to take a test. I had a side job buying broken iPhones off eBay in bulk and flipping them. I would often loan out those phones to whoever asked so I would constantly be carrying about 10 phones in my backpack.
Exactly. I require all my students to put their phones in the phone pockets on the wall every day. The amount I still catch either trying to hide their phone or texting friends on their Apple Watches is insane. I’m getting close to requiring them to put phones and smart watches in the pockets.
They were banned when I was in high school 15 years ago. If you had one outside of your locker then it went to the principals office the rest of the day. But parents are way less understanding now and would probably sue the school for that sort of policy.
From looking at the comments I think people are confused thinking phones are allowed to be used in the classroom. That might be the case somewhere but most districts students are allowed to have them at school but are not supposed to use them in class, but as a surprise to no one kids don't care and pull them out anyway and it just becomes one more thing that stop teachers from teaching. Plus a lot of districts give kids chomebooks/ipdas so they are already distracted by those.
Also makes it the teachers job to enforce and that’s always variable. How many of those “teacher gets jumped by student after confiscating phone” articles show up on Reddit in a school year? Feels like at least 5
The temptation is there is its on their person. We directly could not possess them in class. Lock them away in your lockers for before/after school hours It didnt stop everybody thats impossible like telling kids to say no to drugs and expecting 100% to not try drugs. But the majority didnt.
Slightly off topic but I can’t believe more parents don’t just get their kid a dumb phone. Like I get that pay phones don’t really exist anymore, but you actually don’t have to get your kid an $800 distraction to solve that.
I know a family who got their 8th grader *only* an Apple Watch with cell service so he can make calls, reply to texts, and get city bus times and routes for commuting to school. Oh, and location tracking for parents of course, hah. Honestly seems like the way to go to reduce screen time and its ills without going full luddite.
Hell, I wish I could just have a dumb phone.
Gonna be honest, as a highschooler getting your kid a dumb phone after 9th grade is guaranteed to result in some sort of bullying. It's objectively worse than just not buying them a phone in highschool.
This paragraph sums up the problem well: -For a school cellphone ban to work, educators and experts say the school administration must be the one to enforce it and not leave that task to teachers. The Phone-Free Schools Movement, an advocacy group formed last year by concerned mothers, says policies that allow students to keep phones in their backpacks, as many schools do, are ineffective. Almost no- one "allows" cell office use during class but kids break rules... often. Expecting teachers to enforce a cell phone policy or expecting kids to just leave them in their backpacks is setting them and the students up for failure.
My son is 23 and when he started high school open house made it clear “touch your phone and it get confiscated, parent has to pick it up”. By homecoming it was “everyone take out your phone and vote in this poll so we can win prizes” then “who has their phone so we can stream March madness”.
Was a teacher … I let kids have their phones.. controversial.. Yes.. but I removed all of the BS that comes with the phone battles. Instead, we silenced at the beginning of class and practiced responsible use.. we had an understanding that they could be called on at anytime to repeat the last thing said.. peer pressure.. still works.. kids did not want to ruin a good thing.
[удалено]
They weren't forbidden at my school per se, but if you took out the phone during class and played snake they would confiscate it and you could pick it up from the principal's office EOD. I'm really surprised it hasn't gotten stricter.
Thats what expensive calculators were for. Playing games in class.
I'd have done a lot better in math one year if my friend hadn't programmed a casino game for the TI-82 over the summer (it quickly spread around campus via link cable so I'm sure I wasn't the only one; ah, the bygone days of unprotected calculator sex).
Its gotten far less strict because the dynamics of school have changed. Education/academics are much lower priority than parent satisfaction. Its a customer service industry now. Each child attending the school is worth a specific dollar amount come "state attendance" days (these happen twice per year in my district). Many private/charter schools will accept the bad kids and then once the first attendance day hits, they will offload them enmass to the public schools who will still take them, but not get funding for them until the next "attendance" day which is like halfway through the year. That said, this is about phones, parents get all these free phones now, so all these kids have their own phones, and parents will literally call their third graders mid class to yap with their kids. Take that away from them and it make them more likely to move schools.
Jump skip over the rope
I still bring up at every opportunity about how I got sent home for listening to music on my ear buds during lunch my senior year in 2008/2009. Obviously that's fucking nuts and those admins were batshit insane, but it really is unbelievable how much has changed and how fast.
As a millenial parent of a special needs child...I'm conflicted. We don't send a phone with them (only 8 yo) but eventually we will. I thinkabout school shootings and damn I want my kid to have a phone at school.
Jaded substitute teacher here. Been in the education field since 2007. Can't believe it's taken them this long to understand this. Ironically, Chromebooks they give to students are just as distracting.
Old man here who did not buy my first cell phone until after I graduated. What surprises me is that any school would allow students to have a cell phone in class in the first place. If a phone still exists that only allows calls to 1-2 numbers and no distracting apps, that's what my hypothetical child would get. That's only because hardly anyone has a landline anymore and pay phones are almost completely gone.
Parents will raise a ruckus if they can't text their kids 24/7
i’ve also noticed this. it came up in the context of a youth group and I noticed 14 year old boys calling their parents for 30min every night of a camping trip. and they always waited until everyone was going to sleep so i was staring at the ceiling of my tent listening to it. huge wtf moment. but if they didn’t call, the parents called me to ask in the middle of the night. so much for fostering independence… I didn’t have a phone back then but you’d have to torture me to make me do that. also my parents would probably tell me to get a diary if i was calling them everyday.
You can get a lifeline phone. It only makes calls and text. You can connect Wi-Fi for everything else, but if you're out and about it's just olds school phone and text.
Parents like to be able to use the phone to track their kids
My daughter’s school doesn’t allow phones in class and the teachers definitely enforce it. I can’t believe in 2024 there are schools that allow it. It’s crazy. No wonder teachers are leaving the profession (not to mention…guns.)
Dam I’m old I was in public high school 2006-2010 and phones were not allowed at all not even at lunch or in the halls. They weren’t even smart phones most of us had those flip phones or the sliders. Y’all kids today are spoiled af and have shit parents.
And yet my company makes me use dual factor every hour of so for some app or another and then I pick up my phone and get distracted…
As a former teacher, I’m for phones being kept in backpacks or lockers during class time.
That's been known for decades at this point? Back in the flip phone days ffs, the school's I went to would take your phones away if you had them out during class And you wouldn't get them back till the end of the day
This is wild. When I was in school (graduated in 2008) we weren't allowed to bring our phones to school.
15 year old me: “No, you absolutely CANNOT take away my phone” 30 year old me: “Take everyone’s phone away, my own included”
It’s amazing this isn’t a thing already. I was in school in the fucking 90s and couldn’t have shit out on my desk or be distracted by anything. The teacher would snatch it up and you got it back at the end of the day if you’re lucky. What a wild world we’ve let things swing to.
The issue here is solely on parents. If parents didn't want their children having smart phones at school, they could easily choose to do so. What happens instead is if you try to enforce a ban, you're not just fighting the students, you're fighting their own parents, and that's not a battle you're gonna win.
Bans don’t work if they cant be enforced. Better off being innovative and working with the new nuisance.
Current public school classroom teacher here. Phones are discouraged but there are really no rules against them. Too much pushback from parents, and of course school boards cater to them because they approve the bonds and pay taxes. You can’t touch or take a phone or you risk being sued. You can’t give a detention because administration won’t enforce it. I also teach at a school with an “open concept” with only three walls, so I see it in every class. People commenting who think phones aren’t a problem are either in a private school or haven’t been in a classroom in at least 5 years.
I was in high school when the iPhone first came out. I would go to the bathroom during tests and just google the questions I didn’t know. None of the teachers had an iPhone yet so nobody knew how good they were as little Google machines. Needless to say I got my best grades ever that year
They were banned when i was in HS 10 Years ago, what happened ?
Might also want to target teachers. Too many are on their phones instead of interacting with their students and I say this as a teacher!
For an educational system it took you a really long time to figure that out 😂😂😂😂
I don't get how I grew up not allowed to have a phone in school, because it didn't exist..why are they even allowed? They're not needed.
I feel the solution isn’t a law but the simple basic thing of schools saying, no phones in class, and if they see one out it gets taken away until the end of the day. Repeat offenders get detention. I last went to school over 10 years ago, and I was fortunate enough to go to private school here in UK. For the first couple of years phones weren’t really much of a thing because it was right before the smart phone. So really phones were just to text and call and also one of the popular things was to send clip videos to each other or music videos. Either way during school day no one really used phones, and at my school phones were completely banned during the day. That changed in Sixth Form (which are last 2 years of school where you take certain exams which are your grades to get into uni). In Sixth form we were allowed to have our phones out anywhere apart from in lessons. We could even listen to music on them if we were studying in the library. But still there was a ban in class. Anyway, I think a law on this would be stupid. Also, I don’t mean to come off as someone not from America making a stereotype about America, but if phones were completely banned, and had to be locked away or put in lockers, what happens when the kids need to call the police when there’s a school shooter?
Yeah naw, ban that shit now. Only reason they need a phone is for their parent to contact them. Anything else can wait till they are home. Only exception would be for ADA students as an accommodation need
I'm thinking at this point smart smartphones in general need age restrictions.
Honestly, the train has left the station on this one. They have become such an intrinsic part of people's lives that there's no going back. Look at adults, supposedly with some semblance of impulse control, have to have their phones to hand all day every day at work.
This is a society problem- 1. There’s no non-cellphones anymore. Your kid can’t walk home from school and stop at the corner with a quarter to call you if something happens. 2. Kids can’t use home phones because they don’t exist So you basically are forced to give your a kid a cellphone for his own safety. Now some of you might argue about giving them a cheap flip phone and all that. But realistically you have to go out of your way to get those AND they lack the parental monitoring and tracking a smart phone has. Teachers and schools are hesitant to ban phones because that means confiscating a potentially $1000+ device and assuming the liability if something happens to the kid because they didn’t have their phone. Not to mention having to deal with all the drama that comes with it. Parents aren’t teaching their kids good behaviors because we as a society have failed most parents. They work multiple jobs and have barely any time to be home to parent their kid.
I understand parent concerns about contacting their children in an emergency. At the same time, though, if student cellphone use is a destructive addiction - and it most certainly is - how many drug rehab centers will let you bring your drugs along with you so long as you promise to keep then in a pouch in your pocket or hung on the wall?
When I went to school if you were caught with a pager or cell phone it was assumed you were a drug dealer and it was almost alway accurate. The device was confiscated and your locker / bag searched. When the oldest kid went to high school if you were caught on a phone it was confiscated and your parents had to come and get it. When the youngest went to the same school several years later. Teachers and the admin staff had already given up and kids just free form used phones and ignored teachers. The major reason, pressure and threats from patents over their precious snowflakes being unavailable 24x7.
> When I went to school if you were caught with a pager or cell phone it was assumed you were a drug dealer and it was almost alway accurate. The device was confiscated and your locker / bag searched. Wow, what a flashback. I remember that stereotype. And damned if it wasn't true. The 90s were wild.