41–50 of 106 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Around here, unfortunately yes. The general argument I've heard is that kids need to be able to contact parents in an emergency, or something.
It's amazing how these arguments come about. Were parents freaking out about emergencies at school when they were kids?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's as if the school doesn't have any phones they could use in an emergency.
An emergency like active shooter, not your child had an accident. During active shooter situations, the school isn't going to call the parents of the students. They have other things to worry about. The kids are calling their parents directly.
To do what? Come save them Delta Force style?
If such an unfortunate thing happens, the kids are dependent on law enforcement, not parents, for safety.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's as if the school doesn't have any phones they could use in an emergency.
An emergency like active shooter, not your child had an accident. During active shooter situations, the school isn't going to call the parents of the students. They have other things to worry about. The kids are calling their parents directly.
Schools have communication plans for exactly this situation.
If you have a kid in school, you will be aware that schools have no qualms about communicating directly with parents via automated texts, emails, and phone calls, constantly, about nonemergencies. The volume of communication from schools is overwhelming. Putting out a notification about an active shooter incident would be easy. The trick would be getting the school admins to just send it out as a simple message, and not as a link to a Google doc containing a scan of a printout of the notification.
Maybe I'm out of the loop... smartphones are allowed in the first place? When did that happen? In my high school, cell phones and ipods (at the time) were to be in lockers and turned off during the day. It was an insta-detention if you were seen using one.
Maybe I'm out of the loop... smartphones are allowed in the first place? When did that happen? In my high school, cell phones and ipods (at the time) were to be in lockers and turned off during the day. It was an insta-detention if you were seen using one.
Maybe that's draconian. But maybe it's just good sense -- our high school is close to #1 in the state for academic performance, so they are doing something right.
Those phones contain all the knowledge the school pretends to teach the students. Techers are worried because they see telephones as competition. This would be a nice experiment: Divide the students into two groups and let one group come to school without phones and let the other group stay home and learn the same material from their phones. If the material to be learned is well-defined I believe that students stayin…
Tough call, folks!
This is an elite boarding school in the Berkshires. Not sure that the cell phone ban is the most important thing in these outcomes and I'd hesitate to draw sweeping generalizations here.
> A survey of a school district in Virginia found that about a third of teachers were telling students to put away their cellphones five to 10 times a class, and 14.7% did so more than 20 times a class.
> When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health. Nearly two-thirds believed the devices were adversely affecting academic performances as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Around here, unfortunately yes. The general argument I've heard is that kids need to be able to contact parents in an emergency, or something.
School shootings come up a lot in these kinds of conversations. Of course you can run the numbers and realize this plainly falls way below the level at which anyone should be using that use-case as a justification for anything. (nb. the vast majority of school shootings you'll see in the statistics aren't the sort where kids having phones matters, they're e.g. targeted attacks on a single person, gang- or otherwise c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the rise in school shootings (I graduated in 98, Columbine was for me the first, and one of the deadliest obviously, but ever since it's just escalated).. I've got two boys 4 and 6, they don't have cellphones now, but I freak and feel I need to do damage control/therapy with them everytime they have an active shooter drill. We only ever had to deal with Tornado, and Fire drills. ADHD tangent aside my point is: I…
To be honest, I think your fear is overblown, but I understand how it is having kids you love. But let's assume a rare mass shooting actually happens (I forbid this thought)...will there be any point calling your kids? A phone will be more of a liability than an asset at that point..
That we have so many school shootings is shameful.
That we've decided a good reaction to them is to traumatize huge numbers of students (and staff! My former-teacher wife has stories...) over something that's, as shameful as the cases of it are, in fact extremely unlikely (specifically, an indiscriminate mass shooting at a primary or secondary school) is also shameful.