How do schools deal with smartphones nowadays?

How do school systems deal with kids as young as 6 owing a cell phone now? Do they ban them, require them to be turned off during the school day? How is this dealt with today?

I know if I were a teacher, I wouldn't put up with any cell phone usage while I was teaching K-12.

Unfortunately some teachers buy and use jammers.

The last one I found wiped out everything from about 700 MHz to around 1.9 GHz for about a 1/2 mile around the school (his classroom was upstairs on a corner...perfect storm). Killed the uplink on cell sites for a mile away. The sheriff's department provided security in the school and wondered why their radios suddenly stopped working.

Our school here says keep them in your locker. 2nd time you have your cellphone out of your locker it is kept by the school until the end of the year is what one of our teachers told us.

Phones are off during teaching hours, but can be used during lunch and recess. First time you break the rule the phone is confiscated and the parent must sign for it (along with sitting through the rule lecture and signing that they agree their child will abide by those rules and agree to the prescribed punishments) prior to getting it back. Second violation the phone is confiscated and not returned without court order (as explained to the parent during the first offence conference) and child is no longer allowed to have a phone at school.

I was in high school from 2001-2005. I had a Motorola flip phone and I never used it in class. I would check my messages in between periods. Kids today have a lack of respect for the classroom.

What happened to the teacher with the illegal cell jammer?

pinballwiz86 said:

What happened to the teacher with the illegal cell jammer?

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We convinced him to leave it off. I didn't want to get the FCC involved as I understood his frustration with students using phones during class. If the problem arose again we knew where to look.

I don't know what, if anything, the school administration did to him. We got the principal, S.O. and IT department involved so it had a lot of visibility within the district.

He did say it was very common among teachers and he would spread the word that they do more than stop students from using phones.

n5ims said:

Phones are off during teaching hours, but can be used during lunch and recess. First time you break the rule the phone is confiscated and the parent must sign for it (along with sitting through the rule lecture and signing that they agree their child will abide by those rules and agree to the prescribed punishments) prior to getting it back. Second violation the phone is confiscated and not returned without court order (as explained to the parent during the first offence conference) and child is no longer allowed to have a phone at school.

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Wow. Those are strict rules, and I like them!

way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, our school district (one of the largest in the state) made the mere possesion of any communication device on campus contraband and subject to confiscation by school police. Back then, cellular phones were the size of an APX7000 and most kids had pagers.

Then Columbine happened in 1999, and the district changed the rules. Now cellphones are allowed but must be stowed away in lockers or bookbags during the school day, and aren't supposed to be used on school buses. But everytime I see kids on school buses, they are busy away on them. Hard to imagine there was a time when people were not buried in some device. And people thought I was strange toting an MX330 VHF back in those days.

I was in high school from 2006-2010. IPhone showed up (becoming popular) my junior year.

Our rules changed a few times. Phones were okay during breaks, then they weren't. IPods were okay with teacher approval.

I went to a school that was small (820 student capacity) and if you were in an interior room, you had to put your phone on the desk just to send a text. So, it wasn't a huge problem.

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Dang. We had 2 pay phones on my high school campus and I had to drop a dime if I wanted to call someone. I didn't get my own cell phone until I was in my mid 20's and it came in a bag.

Schools are very much like police these days. They are agents of our government that don't allow the public to monitor their activities. Schools are very nervous about students having anything that might capture any illegal or unethical activity on the part of the teachers or administrators. That is why pretty anything electronic (ipods, phones, digital recorders, etc) are contraband. Part of my job is to work with blind students in some school districts. Blind kids use electronic note takers (since they cant take notes on paper) and some teachers hate the things because they think they have cameras built in (they don't). I have known of even one incident where a classroom teacher took a $6k notetaker away from a blind student and violently smashed it against a wall. Oddly it was the school district itself that supplied the notetaker. If you object to students having electronics then I assume you also object to cops having body cams and believe the FOIA laws should be repealed to allow the government to operate in complete secrecy.

mmckenna said:

Dang. We had 2 pay phones on my high school campus and I had to drop a dime if I wanted to call someone. I didn't get my own cell phone until I was in my mid 20's and it came in a bag.

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Much the same here, except we only had one pay phone and I was 35 when I got a bag phone, he he! Sure wish phones today worked as well as that one did.

Schools here mandate that the kids have to keep the phones turned off and left in their lockers during school, period. Not sure about bus regulations but I too often see a bus full of kids being way quieter than I and others my age would have been back then, their noses buried in their phones. How did we ever survive without such things?:roll:

mmckenna said:

Dang. We had 2 pay phones on my high school campus and I had to drop a dime if I wanted to call someone. I didn't get my own cell phone until I was in my mid 20's and it came in a bag.

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You raise a good point. In my 4 years in high school, there were 4 pay phones that hardly ever got used. I never needed to use them ever.

I can see a total ban of cell phones in school, but on the bus?

Back in the day

mmckenna said:

Dang. We had 2 pay phones on my high school campus and I had to drop a dime if I wanted to call someone. I didn't get my own cell phone until I was in my mid 20's and it came in a bag.

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I love telling this true story, even if it is off topic, but since you started "Back in the day", here it is:

When I was growing up, my folks had a cottage on a lake about two hours from the house. We would get out of school in June, stay up there all summer, and come back in September. There was no phone at the cottage. My dad would swing by the house after work about twice a week to get the mail and mow. There was no answering machine at the house. So basically the entire time I grew up, no one could get hold of us for almost three months a year.

And now if I leave my house without my phone, I panic, turn around and go get it.

This incident earlier today was broadcast live via periscope by a student....not sure what the school's policy is, but something like this could compromise student safety.

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