The problem with this position is that your child being a victim of a school shooting is extremely rare. Phones are ubiquitous. You’re trading the risk of something that will likely not happen to any one student (and won’t really help anything anyway), for a near guaranteed risk of serious damage to many kids education.

Flip phones still exist.

You understand that a lot of communication in that scenario can, at worst, lead to crucial misinformation about what’s going on and, at best, is unnecessary, don’t you?

Obviously, these shootings happen, but the solution is not to arm each student with a cell phone, just as it sure as hell isn’t to arm each teacher with a firearm.

The detrimental effects of cell phone usage in the classroom are well documented and plain as day if you just walk into a high school or middle school lesson. Even with highly engaging teachers and lessons, there are kids who slip through the cracks because nobody can compete with the newest fad app designed to melt a child’s brain and possibly drain their parent’s bank accounts.

This move addresses a significant issue within our school system. Addressing gun violence in the US is a very complex issue that needs to be tackled through a lot of different fronts. Kids having smart phones in school will not address that issue.

This wasn’t possible 10 years ago so why does it matter today?

Besides, the cops are just going to arrest you if you try to go in, they have to stand outside and let the shooter play themselves out shooting your kids before they’ll let anyone in.

I mean, you could get social media companies to turn posting off during school hours, that’d sure take the wind out of the sales of most of the most blatant things students do when they pull their phones out in class

Little derps get their news from that shit anyways, let’s treat it the same as the 24 hour news cycle crisis and just make the companies stop for the parts of the day where people need most to be focusing on other shit. No airwaves, no airwaves occupying everyone’s eyeballs and sending them into doomscroll mode.

Honestly that could be a pretty good gimmick for a new social media company in general, you can write, snap, record, photograph whatever, BUT all posts publish in the morning or evening “editions” and comments are open for 2 hours after (you can go back and comment on old posts), I feel like it could be an artificial scarcity thing, if people only have limited time when they can use the platform in a day, they’ll make the most of that time whenever they’re able.

I believe in educating kids to know how to ignore distractions. The phone will be there in every work/life situation and will be a tool used to get them further in their careers and life in general. It’s stupid to let them use them openly during class… It’s also stupid to make legislation about them. Notice we don’t have country wide dress codes for schools. Just legislation that says when such codes have gone to far. Banning students from having items they carry daily is just a stupid over abuse of power being instated for what reason? Failed parenting and failed educators?

You text during class you get told to stop, happens again you get detention/thrown out of class/sent to the dean and eventually thrown out of the school. Always was that way. No need for laws around it.

The other side of the coin on this. Cell phones as day planners are invaluable. So kids who have spent their lives organizing their schedules on digital calendars are being told “Oops! Sorry. You can’t use that anymore. We caught someone else using it incorrectly.”

Incidentally, I’m old enough to remember how every graphing calculator in the school had video games installed on them and half my class carried a gameboy someone on their persons. This is going to be pure wack-a-mole as a policy. Selectively enforced, with lots of high profile punishments for minor infractions and inevitably highly intrusive misconduct by individual teachers and principles. Richer, whiter students will almost certainly be exempted from the policy through loopholes. Poorer, blacker students will be shoved even more forcefully through the School To Prison Pipeline. Cops will inevitably get involved in the worst possible way.

And all of this will be sold as a means of “reducing distractions”.

When using the right tools, phones are already incredibly powerful in an educational environment. There’s a reason why Kahoot achieved meme status: it’s because students love it.

Yeah, and there are some analytical apps for smartphone cameras and sensors, like measuring physio with accel or gyro. But I guess that’s okay to include as a part of a course and not really needed for rest of the school day

Anyone can introduce a bill, including you. Only the legislature’s vote on it counts.

so that parents and school staff are all on the same page.

That’s the problem, they aren’t on the same page. Teachers and admins have to live in the reality of kids having these devices in school, while parents just live in the anxiety of the very rare “what if something happens?”

A lot of things are here to say that you don’t bring to school.

You’re free to parent your own children however you like.

The state is responsible for the education of children. This absolutely falls within their scope.

Yes, education is important, and this would spare every single school the intense battle vs parents to do the right thing.

The key thing is that teachers can ban phones in their individual classrooms if the school permits it.

There are many schools in which the senior admin don’t institute phone bans (you’d be surprised how common this is).

Legislating it helps maintain consistency and parity between schools nation wide, which is important as it’s a quality of education issue, so the policy should be consistent across all schools.

I’m not from North America, but the situation is similar across most western democracies.

I work in a high school in a California school district where they’re discussing banning cell phones.

Most teachers I’ve talked to about it think it’s really fucking stupid because you’re not going to be able to ban them, partly because a TON of parents showed up at the school board meeting to say they would send them with their kid anyway for a variety of reasons. The board also talked about different things they could buy to take phones and lock them up during class or as students come in. Most of the solutions were pretty expensive, and some of the schools are literally falling apart, so that also pissed people off.

A great start would be to have a campus-wide rule that is CONSISTENT. Some teachers give out a detention if they even see the phone. Some do activities with QR codes and use them as tools. Some have boxes on the corner of their desk and students are required to keep their phone in the box so the teacher can see if they reach for it. We have students with free periods, and if they don’t go home, they hang out outside around campus or in the library. Should phones be banned then too? Or just during class?

There are so many ways to try to deal with it, and at least in my school (not even the district as a whole), every teacher deals with it differently. I doubt the state of New York is all that different.

Taking away freedoms for some possible benefits. The patriot act would like a word

As someone who went through the NY public school system many years ago, I can confirm hats were/are hard banned. Like unless it was for religious reasons you really couldn’t even think about putting something on your head.

Cell phones were also banned in my youth but I guess times have changed?

Doesn’t need to be on a phone.

At a certain age/level I agree. However, they aren’t needed or helpful in basic low level grades where you’re teaching the framework to build upon.

Reading books worked fine for a few thousand years.