its a blanket rule, which has almost no exceptions. So there are some silly parts. One of my kids is in band and the school uses YONDER pouches. They have had to dig out some really, really old analog tuners to use. They have a fraction of the capability of a $4 IOS app, but the kids are supposed to keep their phones in a special sleeve with no exceptions... (so many kids break that rule, or throw an old dummy phone…
Tuning by ears is an important skill for musicians, learning that is beneficial. For example, you cannot rely on apps to tune your signing voice during performance.
> Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school The tracker sends a notification when they're not at school, that's the point. Plus, I can lock down social media apps only during school hours. Blanket statements like this are plain ignorant. Also, I'm glad Utah finally passed a similar ban. Phones in use in class are a tremendous distraction 99% of the time.
This is ridiculous. The school will notify you if the student is not at school, or the teachers will eventually (or their grades/missing assignments). Also you don't need to track your kids to enable school time mode, if you want to lock down their phone during school. What are you going to do when they go to college? Track them? Monitor them? Make sure they go to classes? At some point, you just have to trust your k…
This is even more ridiculous, how about that?? My particular school will send a message at 5pm daily with any attendance issues, but I can be notified instantly through the app. Why would I ever choose to be less informed? Also, I appreciate your points about college, but have you noticed a large number of students disproportionately boys are disenchanted with the whole education system at large and opting out of college. I'm clinging on to a hope that mine will see the value, but there are lots of different developmental speeds and some students need more guidance than others. You do realize some high school students just become burnouts, right? Your one size fits all, hands off and trust mentality is naïve and if you happen to be a parent, hopefully you'll be able to avoid the situation of parenting a student in crisis. Cell phones are a major problem in schools and I'm glad to see efforts being made to address it
> In crafting its policy, Estacada incorporated feedback from parents. That led to some key decisions around the cell phone ban. Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks. That was for two reasons — it allows students to contact loved ones during emergencies, and many parents use phone trackers to keep tabs on their kids. I'm glad to hear this. They…
>Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule. And what if they don't? En masse?
At first a lot of parents get inconvenienced coming to get confiscated phones and if that doesn't inspire them to discipline their kid at home the school can move to the more draconian pouch systems.
I'm a little confussd... was there a point they were allowed? I went to school in the late 2000s, and even at that point if a teacher saw you with a cell phone it was immediately confiscated.
In the last 10 years, driven a lot by school shootings, the tide shifted and parents started fighting schools about letting their kids keep their phone "so they can be contacted in emergencies". The schools gave up fighting with the parents. Laws like this give the school cover to confiscate the phones and say "talk to your congressperson if this bothers you, my hands are tied".
FWIW i'm outside the US so maybe there are cultural differences.
Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the las…
Part of the problem is with each step down the ladder there's less authority and support and more chances for blowback from angry parents going higher up the chain. Teachers fear not getting support from principals if they're DIYing a device ban, principals fear blowback from complaints to the board or superintendent etc.
There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.
Don't get it twisted, almost every Portland-area school has gone full in on the stupid fucking Yondr pouches, and yeah it fucked up entry/exit: https://katu.com/news/local/portland-students-adapt-to-new-c... They also begged parents to help pay for them: https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-... A friend's kid needs an exemption from their doctor because their phone is also their glucose monitor…
What a vulgar situation. Policy made from a moral panic and - look at that - it is negatively impacting actual people who exist.
It's not a moral panic. There are loads of studies indicating that disconnected classrooms produce better outcomes for students.
I'm not sure what argument there is for allowing all students unfettered access to their phones, but feel free to present one.
Surely an electronic wrist watch is fine, and maybe an mp3 player. Also graphing calculators.
Do graphing calculators actually help people learn? We used them in high school, but when i needed to take calculus in university we didn't use them. I'm doubtful they are good for learning especially when trying to teach the foundations.
It really depends on the level of the class and the goals. Usually by the time you're getting to calculus you're moving away from simply calculating a numerical answer anyways and the problems where you do need to find one just to test that final step can be finessed so they're simple to calculate by hand and eliminate the problem of full computer algebra system calculators that can handle the symbolic manipulation too.
In 2026 the number of people with mp3 players that are not also smart phones is vanishingly small.
If they're allowed and help where phones wouldn't or don't there are still lots of options for stand alone MP3 players with minimal or no connectivity. They still exist as a market because they're dirt cheap to make.
I think this more about it coming from a higher authority than the school itself. Many schools have similar bans but they don’t get support from many of the pupils or their parents as both groups have members that just believe it is the school choosing to overstep their authority. Now it is a diktat from above it makes the school’s job in enforcing it much easier. They can just point to the relevant legislation/dikta…
This notion discomforts me. It has poor implication for decentralization of decision making, i.e. federalism in school administration.