Indiana just passed legislation to require schools to ban phones.
They permit them for health reasons, emergencies, when part of lesson, and when part of a formal plan.
I personally don’t like the idea of schools requiring locking them up. What would you do in that emergency they mentioned?
Why should kids not be able to use them at lunch?
If you want to control your kid’s phone time, there’s already apps for that.
Edit: additional comment from a teacher: she said the phone restrictions aren’t going to be as effective as one would think with all the kids having watches with data plans. Dude…
The schools and teachers have dealt with this on their own. Its asinine because they figured this out decades ago, yet here come the congress-critters to tell them how to do it “better”. Bet you $5 the final bill includes some mandate to use lock-boxes or “charging stations” from a specific vendor. 🤑
Its a “solution” looking to solve a problem long past, and probably just a trojan horse for some new graft and top-down meddling.
I mentioned the other stuff to highlight that this state knows how to be hands-off, until some new opportunity comes along to sabotage public schools and make working as a teacher in them even more insufferable.
I am not opposed to “un-schooling”, but this state’s implimentation is not so much acceptance of un-schooling as it is failing to enforce the standards it has laid out. The law on the matter is just vague enough for parents who can afford a lawyer to do whatever while still charging poor parents/students with truancy whenever some bureaucrat gets a wild hair up their ass.
I’m completely in agreement with a lack of enforcement of standards. I haven’t read Indiana’s, but I’ve seen instances of a child’s learning not being checked in anyway, which led to them growing up without even the GED equivalent of knowledge.
Where are you getting vender solutions?
Also, where are you getting it’s not a problem or already been solved?
I ask because the three teachers I’ve talked to from three different districts all day it’s a huge problem.
When I asked them if this would solve it however, they said no because smart watches and the school isn’t allowed to discipline kids in anyway. By that, they meant detention or something, not hitting them or something crazy.
To me, this doesn’t seem like a false problem.
I have three teenagers in Highschool in Indiana. Students in their classes might get their phones out when they are not supposed to, but they put them away when called on it and are sent to the office if they distract others. In our school district at least, teachers have plenty of means to discipline students, or at least remove distractions when they occur. Every highschool here has a Police Liason Officer, and refusing to follow teacher’s orders(especially to leave the classroom) is treated as a crime or … a “crowd management” issue.
As for cell phones specifically, shoe organizer on the back of the classroom door, or cubbies(cub-bee) in a locked cabinet, ringers off and stashed like so at the beginning of class, done. There’s no shortage of (cheap)options available options for teachers nor of administrators willing to back teachers conventional(and long-established) plays on (somehow 🙄)high-profile issues.
Vendors? Look at private prisons and charter schools(both of which Democrats in office have been all-to-happy to facilitate, and Republicans love). Someone with a “solution”, or just planning to have a solution greases some palms, and suddenly the state is buying “the solution” from “the lowest bidder”, who just so happens to be the only bidder until their name is synonymous with “the solution” statewide, for decades.
If you were not aware, Indiana is a Republican state. Such things are very much out in the open here. Wouldn’t surprise me if this law passed, and suddenly there’s a re-branded Pyxis Medstation(a $32,000 machine) with Cubie(kew-bee) Drawers(an expensive add-on) in every classroom, with an expensive mainenance contract to boot.
Hyperbole, hopefully - that was the worst possibility I could come up with, but that product actually exists, and you get the idea. No way in hell the state is coming up with a better(or cheaper) solution than the teachers already use. That’s like assuming California Governor Newsome’s “bread exemption” to the $20hr Fast-Food Worker Minimum Wage serves a useful purpose besides doing a favor to the Owner of Panera, a close personal friend of his. Newsome is a Democrat, by the way.
This is interesting. I’ve got some time before I start needing to be at school meetings and such. I’ll see how these things go before then.