Kansas Schools Now Collect Phones at the Door – Spends $180K On Smartphone Lockers
At least one Kansas district is projecting $150,000 to $180,000 just to equip secondary students with individual phone lockers, according to the Wichita Eagle. The state provided zero dedicated funding. Every dollar comes from local budgets.
Districts choosing fabric locking pouches — think Yondr, the magnetic-lock system concert venues use to keep audiences present — face an estimated $30 per unit. Statewide, the Kansas Division of the Budget put that figure at roughly $13.4 million if every student received one, according to the Lawrence KS Times. Lockers require a steeper upfront investment. Neither option came with a state check attached.
Legislators passed the policy. The price tag was someone else’s problem.
It is long past time cell phones started to be regulated in schools. (And nationwide, but that’ll never happen.)
BUT…
…what gets me is the money angle here. Can anyone out there help me understand why a temp-use cell phone locker is $180,000? To me, this just screams government malfeasance, and I’d bet someone involved in the passage of this bill either owns a company or took a bribe from the company that wants to sell $180,000 cell phone lockers that people are forced to buy.
100% behind phone lockers, but, I do agree the price seems too high for this specific implementation. Looks like those hold ~250 phones each and I’m going to guess should cost $500-$1,000 per locker. A school should only be spending $5k-50k on these lockers.
$180,000 is absolutely insane. You could literally just get a lockable file cabinet from the 80’s or something and put each phone in its own file folder a few hundred.
This isn’t for one school, this is for the entire school district. Kansas City SD has 14,000 students across 33 schools. You also have to take into account paying for installation and shipping of 60 of those lockers.
Followed some links and did some googling. The school district in question is USD-261 in Haysville, Kansas. The high school should have about 1800 students, so they would need 67 of these cell phone lockers. The price for 6+ is $1510, but let’s knock another $110 off since they’re buying 11 times that many, so $1400. That’s $93,800, for just the high school, and that’s before we talk about where the hell you’re going to put 67 of those things, and who you’re going to pay to install them and do any necessary renovations to accommodate them.
Go for it. I don’t need any recognition or anything. A couple disclaimers:
1 - I’m not from the area in question, but I work in the public sector overseeing spending, so I thought it was an interesting exercise in understanding the scale we end up dealing with. So my comment is just a demonstration. None of this is actual information about the specific school district’s plans. I’m assuming they must be getting their lockers even cheaper than the ones I found with a quick search, because with my numbers you’re blowing past $180k pretty quickly once you scale it up to the whole district.
2 - I used this site for the student population. I didn’t cross-reference it or anything, so I have no idea how accurate it is. It states 5788 total enrollment, with 31.2% at Campus High School, so that’s where I got the 1800 students. It looks like the district serves multiple southwestern suburbs of Wichita, which makes a little more sense since the total population of Haysville itself is under 12k.
It’s also 180K for a 15-20 year refresh cycle. These are commercial units that are used in harsh environments… not a cabinet you buy once and it sits in your bedroom.
Add in wiring plus the install costs and $180K seems like a good deal
Looks like you have to touch it to some tjing to get it to unlock. I wonder, what if you go to an event that uses these, you get piss drunk,and forget to unlock it before you leave. Are you just fucked now?
There are so many ways to handle this that don’t require $180,000 in spending. You could use a physical closet somewhere in the school, an old-ass lockable filing cabinet, or just require that they be left at home and punish offenders.
it’s a question of how you choose to enforce the policy. locking up phones as each student enters the building guarantees close to 100% compliance and the rest of the day is undisturbed.
if they just tell students phones have to stay in lockers then teachers will constantly have to be on the lookout for phones and will never get close to 100% compliance.
I don’t see how there is a difference. do they have cell phone sensing technology and have somone take them and lock them up or do students lock them up as they enter. it makes no difference if they lock them up in their locker or a special cell phone place. either way some students will try and sneak around it.
We’ve had a mobile phones ban for students in the Netherlands for a few years now. Our kids have been scared away from social media by my wife’s ingestion of fear-based mainstream news and by my anticapitalist ranting, so it doesn’t really impact them. 🙈
Good on you for protecting them from social media. My 12 year old son has no access to any social media. I got parental control everywhere. Google’s family link even has this “school time” function where it minimizes distractions. I honestly wouldn’t even mind if schools said “no phones in class”.
We don’t use any parental controls. Our kids have always been very trustworthy. I disabled all Google parental spying and blocking for my son as soon as the age limitations would allow it. (My stepdaughter was under the thumb of her father’s monitoring for a long time. She had to face his wrath when she turned off location sharing with him on her iPhone… her second year of college.)
We had to brow-beat my son into getting a WhatsApp account so he could chat with his classmates (his actual friends use Signal, but WhatsApp is what group chats mostly use in Holland). 😅
Our KS district is just 100% no devices and no announcement about lockers like in the article. Just an expectation that school landlines will be available when needed, and I forsee that going terribly.
The school has far fewer land lines and support staff than they did when I went to school and parents are already used to making contact via phones and other devices. They will be getting a ton of calls and kids trying to call out. They will adapt eventually, but it will start off as a shitshow.
On top of that they had the ability to check in an out of classes and a ton of other stuff using phones that will no longer be an option. They have inconvenient workarounds, but the transition for those is gonna be a shitshow too.
The schools where I grew up had one landline for over a thousand kids. The sole school secretary answered it as well as handling other duties. It had a call-waiting system. If there was an issue that might prompt lots of parents to call in, they'd just update the OGM: "If you're calling about the such-and-such, here's the latest information. Blah blah. Otherwise, please hold to speak to someone." It was always fine.
As for checking-in to class, no need to use smartphones: teachers can take the register (roll-call) at the start of each class.
I remember a math teacher I had in high school. There was this one girl at the front of the class that would not get off her RAZR flip phone and it was buzzing constantly while she was texting people.
He warned her that if she didn’t put it away, he’d toss it out the window, and she could find it after school let out. She flipped him off and started texting again.
He took it and tossed it out the open window (on the first floor), into the grass. Then 20 minutes later it started raining. 😂
Cardboard boxes are $2 each (go price them at the local home depot). Figure 20 teachers per school (this seems low), and 10 schools per district (this is low), and we are already at $400. Cardboard boxes will not last very long, so we are also replacing them 5 times a year: $2000/year. I expect this lockers are higher quality and will last for a few decades.
…Or they just take an empty box of bananas from the lunchroom that was going to be thrown away anyway and never replace it because it’s a cardboard box ffs not a grocery bag. This is an actual example.
Sounds great until either a) a student laughs, says no, and stays on their phone or b) a teacher gets fired for trying to force a student to drop their phone in a cardboard box
I remember witnessing a) happen more than once, and they ended up in the principal’s office. As for b), the teacher shouldn’t be getting physical, that’s not their job. If a student is being insubordinate in any way, there are already mechanisms in place to deal with it. This is nothing new.
The dumb thing about all this is, I was able to manage keeping my phone away just fine through high school. Hell, even kept it in my sock at one point so I’d know if I was getting a call (emergency situation) but it was still away and unused for the school day.
True, but probably not the point. I’m not American, but my country has been banning smartphones too. Apparently kids stopped trying to talk to one another, they just scroll. A few kids will sneak phones, but the culture of avoiding interaction will be broken if they can’t scroll openly.
I still remember one day, in like 2005. I was in a program where long story short I went to school for 1/2 a day, went to work as a network administrator for a credit union for the other half. I had a cell phone and the credit union had my phone number. This day I forgot to silence my phone. Now the credit union was pretty good and specialized in school workers. I was in my last class of the day and my phone rang. I looked at it, saw it who it was, silenced the ringer and let it go to voicemail. My teacher flipped his shit. Started accusing me of everything from cheating(it was a lecture, not a test) to drug dealing. I interrupted him and asked “do you bank with abc credit union?” he was thrown off his rant and said “yes but what does that have to do with anything?” so I simply responded “that was the vice president and cfo of your bank”. “you lie, it’s one of your scumbag friends” I took out the phone, called voicemail and first message started with “hey vrek, this is cfo name vice president and cfo of abc credit union…” this was his normal start of a phone call cause he mostly dealt with other corporations. My teachers face went white and had no idea what to say or do. He literally just ignored it, turned around and went back to lecture lol.
Sadly, you’re right. Different states handle it different ways and we’re still seeing disasters across the board.
I feel awful for the teachers I know. Kids apparently can’t even answer a question when it’s written on the board in front of them, and most can’t focus for more than 60 seconds.
It was awful. We had to walk to school uphill both ways, and since this was pre global warming the snow was higher than our heads. You kids don't know how good you have it. \s
In all seriousness, life is better now that my kids have phones. However it is only slightly better. My school had a phone students could use to call their parents - for all the times my kids use their cell phone to call me - we just had to wait in line for your turn.
My school had a pay phone we could use, but since we never had money we just made collect calls from “hey practice is over” that our parents didn’t accept
Broader than the name suggests, HB 2299 covers cellphones, tablets, smartwatches, wireless earbuds, PDAs, and text-messaging devices — basically everything in a teenager’s backpack except a pencil.
Not like students would have textbooks or calculators or notebooks.
I mean I’ve seen a lot more money wasted on much dumber shit.
Kids aren’t going to learn if they’ve got handheld social media internet gaming consoles with them in school. I wouldn’t have. They’re not going to willingly put them away for hours every day. I wouldn’t have. So…lock the fuckers up. These kids need to be educated so I’m not being taken care of by drooling Idiocracy background actors when I’m in end-of-life care. There’s way too much stupid going around already.
To be clear, 180k is too much. I’m just saying I agree with locking the goddamn things up.
“If you take your phone out you get detention.”
I don’t see why this doesn’t work anymore. Do parents have no control over their kids anymore? You get detention twice, 3rd time suspended, suspended twice 3rd time expelled. If I got suspended from school for taking my phone out my parents would have simply taken away the phone.
Getting expelled from a school most definitely should effect your future. Alternative schools have never been known to be fun. They also don’t usually have buses that come near you, so parents are going to hate having to drive you there, and if they aren’t going you wind up in a situation where the kid gets taken by child protective services, and that’s not a system that has great futures for kids either.
You still can work in an amazon warehouse with or without school, same like most basic entry jobs. When kids realise the market is dead and no amount of education will provide a career they will stop caring.
The job market is not dead. It is slightly down, but there are still a lot of jobs. There have been recessions before. History supports the idea that there will be a recovery in the near future, and then a few more years latter another recession.
Of course if you are the person without a job it does suck. However for the majority things are okay.
History never had the threat of a warming climate. A child starting school now will finish high school in what, 2038? We’ll be above 2 degrees warming by then. They’re in for a rough ride.
There have always been threats yes, but nothing like this. On our current trajectory, billions will die by the end of the century. The impacts of climate change will reshape our global society. Never in history has there been a threat so severe.
Caring about future wasn’t that popular among kids anyway, but when everyone kinda accepts that the future should be sacrificed on an altar of a line going up, it’s even harder to care. We’re going to burn last available resources and warm planet until we can’t grow crops anymore, so we can generate bad videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Who the fuck cares about long division or mitochondria when the most popular occupation in 2050 is projected to be “water refugee”.
Sure, it’s a doom scenario, it’s not guaranteed, we can somehow persevere, humanity always does. And even in the doom scenario It’s not impossible that we’ll conserve the civilization in some form.
What we have lost forever is the trust of our kids, that ship has sailed. When Greta Thunberg asked us not to destroy the planet, the collective response was mockery, anger, and pedo threats. There is a generational disdain bigger than it was for boomers.
I don’t see why this doesn’t work anymore. Do parents have no control over their kids anymore?
I think you just answered your own question.
Clearly we’ve reached the stage of physically taking and locking their phones up during school hours because verbal threats weren’t working. If parents had control of what their kids were doing when not in close proximity to them, this wouldn’t be happening.
Lot of dumb adults out there these days. I think a lot of parents would be on the “but I need to contact them in case of emergencies” and “you’re threatening my child’s rights” boat if they just floated the idea of suspension for phone use. So now we’re at the physically confiscate them upon entering like contraband stage.
I need to contact them in case of an emergency doesn’t mean the phone is out. Also the only emergency that matters is if the kid is in danger and needs to call someone. If Dad falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck you either A, go pick the kid up from school or B tell him when he gets out of school. The kid isn’t a paramedic.
Also kids don’t have rights at school. That’s why they have the ability to search all their lockers, backpacks, and vehicles without a warrant.
There is no law that says you have a right to have your phone in your hand, or it would be illegal to seperate us from them to go through metal detectors and such at airports, courts, etc
An emergency means the kids needs to call 911 not the parents need to contact the student. Most schools have a phone/intercom in each classroom which is close enough though. (Back in my day we did have to use this once when something happened, the teacher dealt with the main issue and assigned a student to push the button to alert the office. I wasn't in that class so I don't recall details)
If dad has hours to live you call the school office - you will need to sign them out anyway so they need to know. (plus they need to know because the school has counselors trained dealing with emotional issues like this who need to be at that school when the kid returns).
Which is to say I can think of no reason a kid needs a phone during class hours. They are sometimes useful after school hours.
Why is 180k too much? I expect the school to be spending the money to buy something of quality that will last for a few years, and they likely have several thousand students. At $100 for each this would cover 1800 students. Even the $30 pouches mentioned only covers 6000 students - I would expect they have spares in each school.
I grew up with no portable electronics available at all, we also didn’t learn shit. If your topic is shit and your presentation is boring, kids would find how to ignore you. If it’s interesting, they will listen to you no matter how many smartphones they have. It’s hard, that’s for sure, but this infantilising bullshit makes it harder, not easier. You have to treat the kids like people, that’s the only way. Also you need to recognise that they aren’t adults, so you can’t expect them have hours of uninterrupted attention, smartphones or not.
i find this policy stupid would of been nice to shrink what i carried back in school phones have there uses one of them being music when your trying concetrate.
Sooooo exactly what happened two decades ago with phones and gameboys? This is so stupid. I got my phone confiscated a few times in high school and had to pay the school $15 or wait 15 days to get it back. Why is this not an option anymore?
Absolutely, yes.
Had my phone rooted and it suddenly crashed and rebooted mid-class blasting Titanium by David Guetta at full volume for it’s boot sequence.
I could get it back after the school day but I am still not over it >:(
But yeah, just confiscate it and get it back after school is done.
Worked so well, let’s avoid looking at the states of the world…
Just install parental control and look the phone during their school time like a fucking responsible parent…
Seem legit, didn’t take in account that kid dont’ hâve a fully developed brain and capitalists know that and exploit that. Sure be a good parent and let capitalist pedo teach your kids without supervisions, what a great idea.
I tought people computers for some time. As long as there is some motivation, you can teach an 80 years old violin teacher to patch Linux drivers and recompile kernel.
It worked, but not well. I remember standing in line for 20 minutes waiting on the one phone to call my parents so they knew my after school activity was done. (while other students were calling their parents).
When your phone is your GPS and radio, no. I was in band, and some days we wouldn’t leave school afterwards because we’d be going to a game across the state. After the game, my mom would want to know where I was, which was usually Waffle House with a dozen others.
It doesnt look like returning the devices has to be immediate or convenient. Heres my proposed plan:
Ban devices entirely. Any item discovered gets confiscated, labeled, and placed in a bin in the office (achieving the “secure” location requirement of the bill.) Students are permitted to label their item. Items are available for pickup weekly at the end of a district-wide midday “value of education” parental education session.
Labelmaker: ~$200/school
Labels: $0.01/item
2 hrs labor weekly: 38×2×$50=$3800/district/year
Value of inconveniencing parents enough to care: priceless.
Look valid, crappy idea. So now the director is responsible if a child is stuck somewhere and can’t reach it’s parents while going to school or coming from school.
That was before enshitification. They dropped pur kid at a random bus stop two weeks before the end os school, bus had issues, we had to go fetch them 2km away. They warned nobody and counted on kid to warn their parents… In this case you expect them to do what ?
It depends, really? 2km of well maintained sidewalks and walkable streets is very different from 2km of no sidewalks and unprotected highway crossings. The school I went to as a kid specifically banned walking home because we had the latter and a kid had got hit and killed because of it.
Well in that case, you have to give the bus drivers rigorous training to reflect the cell phone policy. The bus driver absolutely should not have done that to your kid. That is not acceptable at all. However, that driver probably only did that because they knew your kid had a phone. If they instead knew that no kids in the school are allowed to have phones, they probably would never do something like that. It’s a giant legal liability for the bussing company.
Schools are scared to death of kids recording their staff being stupid, and each other. Legal liability/parental outrage. They block both phones and smart watches. If it were just a usage problem, they could have done what we always do and only take things away when they’re an issue.
Since the advent of phones, this hasn’t been a real problem.
My son’s school collects them at the classroom door if they have them out, or ignores it if they’re in their bag as long as they don’t make noise. - free
Kansas, who is already horrible at maintaining educational budgets to a self-destructive degree wants to spend 150k of (likely unwilling) taxpayer money to provide fancy lockers for phones that could be solved by leave it in your bag and off, if we find it on or it makes noise, you get detention.
It’s a stupid waste or resources and time.
if 0 is the Byrds Turn Turn Turn and 10 is RaTM bulls on parade, maybe go 6 or 7
It’s likely also plain corruption, just lawmakers creating ways for their friends to siphon money from government budgets with useless gadgets like this.
Seems like a straightforward solution to a simple problem. Pretty direct correlation with kids having access to smartphones vs declining grades and attention spans.
In schools that have started simply not allowing phones in class, grades have improved. This seems like the next logical step. Its basically just returning to pre-smartphone days. Schools used to confiscate phones if you had them out at all during school hours.
People will disagree with simple solutions, but those are often the ones that works. Phones cause problems, get rid of phones. Simple and direct.
Are there any studies that link phone use inside schools to those issues? Because I can easily believe that declining grades could be attributed towards the use of tablets and laptops being used in classrooms as well which many schools are encouraging or increasing the use of.
As for attention spans I would believe it’s for the use of phones/tablets/electronics from a young age rather than the use of them inside of a school itself.
Whoa whoa whoa now. Whoa. That is an entirely too reasonable take. No conspiracy, no blaming capitalism or someone trying to scam and grift. Just a reasonable take. Hmmph, I am disappoint. I have nothing to be angry about now. Hmmph!
Great so they can’t contact their parents during next school shooting.
Edit: guess ya’ll didn’t get the broader point of my sarcastic comment which was that US will implement cell phone control before it implements gun control.
You WOULD NOT WANT CHILDREN TO HAVE THEIR PHONES DURING A SCHOOL SHOOTING. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ANYONE WHO SAYS THIS UNDERSTANDS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING ABOUT CHILDREN.
School classrooms have phones if you need to call the police. Multiple children calling is not good and would tie up the line. Children talking on the phone to their parents while they need to be huddled up in a silent and dark classroom is the most obvious fucking problem that anyone who says this shit must have a room temperature IQ.
Not to mention how many of them would be live-streaming it.
Since my state banned cell phones, it has been night and day with behavior. They aren’t recording each other in classrooms, they aren’t blasting TikTok’s while I’m trying to teach. There’s no reason for children to have 24/7 access to the instant dopamine and bullying machine.
We say it because it is true in the country where this keeps fucking happening. How about a less extreme example?
I was a kid in the late 90s in public school, and I had both an IEP and medications to take. The IEP specified exactly which medicines to take and when. One day, the nurse on duty decided I didnt need those meds that day because everything was fine and they were busy. So they sent me back to class. I called my parents on the way and let them know what happened. By the time my parents drove to the school to collect the head of the nurse, I was passing out in the classroom. I was actually unconscious by the time they made it through the “check in” process at the office. My teacher thought I was sleeping in class and just ignored me.
Without that phone call, I might have died. Thats an extreme “what if”, but the possibility was there.
You are expecting a school that is a safe and concerned environment, ans that’s just not the reality in this country. Teachers have 40+ students per class and between 6 and 8 classes in a day. Kids need a way to be heard that isnt another burden on an overworked system. Don’t even get me started about kids who speak up about bullying and get ignored for years. The idea of “lines getting tied up” during a school shooting is laughable in the digital age.
Notice how you had an IEP? Some students also have a 504. There are already systems in place to handle the issue you are describing. I have had 504 kids responsibly use their phones to do things like monitor insulin. Most students this does not apply to.
What do you think happens when 500 kids call the police station at once?
What do you think happens when the kids start talking on their phone during a lockdown?
Children do not need 24/7 access to phones.
I’m sorry, but if you have not run a lockdown drill, you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
Im from the time lockdown drills were invented. They were invented because of school shootings, but instead of actually addressing the issues that caused school shootings, we did shit like lockdown drills and active shooter simulations and whatever school district approved nonsense would appeal to parents.
My parents, being practical people, gave me a cell phone and a glass breaker. They showed me how to use the glass breaker and taught me when to use it. Im still showing them how phones work and when to trust them, but id consider it a good trade. You can train kids to hide like rabbits or you can give them the tools and knowledge they need to make a difference. I can guess where you fall on the spectrum.
Do you work with thirty children at a time? Are you aware of the fact that children in groups in public act differently from children in their home with their parent? You are totally going to be the “no, Johnny doesn’t throw things at home!” type aren’t you?
I have done lockdowns which weren’t school shooter related. It does not matter how well you “train” them. When there are 30+ kids, one of those phones is coming out to be a flashlight, another two are being used to livestream…
Also - school shooter situations are not every day situations. I can tell you in the everyday world, they are absolutely antithetical to any learning. Adults can’t keep off the fucking things at work trainings, why would you not flip through TikTok during math class? They all want to be streamers, so they will insanely stupid and harmful things to get it recorded. They will share awful pictures of each other and say awful things. They will take random phone calls, which are always “from their parents.”
Working with kids has never been easy. Im sorry you chose that for yourself, but sacrifices must be made for the corporate machine to turn out adequately educated fodder.
By the time I was getting through with school, I found myself in a facility specifically designed to accommodate and encourage kids with learning disabilities. Dysgraphia, dyslexia, speech impediments, attention disorders, you name it. If you think teaching baseline kids is tough, try teaching math where half the kids see 6s as 9s and the other half would do better on heiroglyphics than word problems. Then, add in a good third of those kids not just having cell phones, but a full MacBook pro sitting in front of them. Every class. Oh, and the headphones? Covered by the IEP. They’re not going anywhere.
And somehow, some way, despite every distraction and roadblock available to man, they got through it. You know when they say a student can always tell when a teacher really cares? We can.
We had a good group of them at that school, and they went above and beyond to make sure we succeeded as students. They didnt treat us like problems despite the fact that the system thought we were. Im struggling to understand why you think removing the phone is better than teaching them how to use it better. Do you think abstinence is a good sex ed methodology?
Mate, my first year teaching was the year after the district decided to combine several high school across multiple gang lines. Reality and Dangerous Minds have nothing in common, brw.
It’s nice that you got experience in a specialized setting with children from privileged backgrounds in a school designed to meet their needs (not as a teacher even? as a student?) That’s not what most schools like.
You do not understand anything about teaching in a public school. That’s okay. But you can’t pretend you know anything about it. My job is a profession and i am a professional with skills and expertise specific to this environment. Can you imagine someone with no training or experience telling you about how your job works? For lemmings - if someone with zero experience in sysadmin was telling you to just use simple blacklists?
but sacrifices must be made for the corporate machine to turn out adequately educated fodder.
I “got” to experience my school because I was left neglected by a public school system for most of my life, to the point where the state had to intervene and force the school district to pay for private education until I aged out. I know exactly what’s its like to be subject to a failed system that would rather avoid problems instead of confronting them. My last year in the system was the first year we got two squad cars when school got out instead of just the one. I even got to be the one arrested once for talking back to an admin who (pattern here, try to recognize it) decided i didnt need my medication one day. I got to see just about the full classroom to prison pipeline before my parents managed to take out a loan to hire an attorney. Don’t tell me for a fucking instant that I dont know what public school is like.
You, on the other hand, see metal detectors in the halls and think it makes kids safer. You see squad cars outside and think they’re going to protect you. You get to work with the same cop that might kill the parent of one of your kids one day. And instead of finding a problem with that, you’re just happy the kids wont stream from your class anymore. Are you so broken that little victories are all you have left?
You, on the other hand, see metal detectors in the halls and think it makes kids safer. You see squad cars outside and think they’re going to protect you. You get to work with the same cop that might kill the parent of one of your kids one day
Now you are hallucinating. Where the fuck did I say any of that. Sorry you failed to make your argument, now you’re just spouting nonsense.
Time to admit that you have ZERO experience here and have to resort to non sequitors and straw men. (FYI - one of the papers I wrote in graduate school was a literature review on why metal detectors are ineffective. Maybe my dissertation will be about how cell phone bans are effective… I also fought cops in middle schools locally, so doubly fuck you by the way)
My only point was that schools cant be trusted to hear kids who need to be heard, therefore cell phones are necessary in case of an emergency. Your argument was that “streaming makes kids do dumb things” like we didnt have Jackass wannabes growing up as well. How dare children not be obedient when told to sit down and shut up? A flashlight when its dark?! The audacity.
Im sorry you clearly hate working with kids. Its so disappointing to see someone invest the time it takes to earn a masters degree only to hate the field they find themselves in. The fact is that children have always acted like children, regardless of the tech they happen to have. They want attention. They want recognition. They want to be seen. You clearly arent engaging them if they’re on tiktok or streaming their class to their friends. Again, why do you think taking away the phone is better than teaching them to use it? When is abstinence better than education?
When children are being faced with algorithms designed by adults to literally addict them. Lootboxes, short form video content, slop… it’s tailor made to be irresistible to adults - why wouldn’t we expect it to be less so for children?
It does not matter how engaging your lessons are, there are children who will always choose the infinite dopamine machine over anything else when given the option. I’ve had lessons where students have thrown things off buildings, blown shit up for them, where we’ve launched rockets they designed…. and had kids fucking around on their phone.
When I was in college, I was in a program where they took my phone at all times except night for about two weeks and I survived.
I do not understand why everyone thinks they know how to do a teachers job. There’s a reason I got a degree. There’s a reason I studied child psychology as part of my program. Children are not tiny adults.
I am still absolutely fucking furious that you suggest that I hate my job or hate my students. I fucking love teaching and my students. This job is absolutely brutal and difficult and requires me to pay my own money for supplies and work outside my contract hours while paying me so little that I have two part time jobs alongside it. I have pour my heart and soul into this job, and what matters to me is what helps me help these children learn.
And what helps these children learn is not being constantly in proximity to something designed to hook you to an endless stream of short term dopamine bursts.
Cool. So instead of teaching kids the difference between productive screen time and doom scrolling, you embrace abstinence because you did it once and you were fine.
Humanity has been tailor making distractions for millenia. We’ve been hunting the dopamine high since we started banging rocks together. We’ve also been developing self control. Did you forget about that one? Maybe you needed a lockout program for your phone because you were too weak to focus for your own sake?
Again, I dont understand how you can say you love your kids and then set them up for failure in the same breath. You’re like the morons in the 90’s who told us we’d never have a calculator in the real world just to be forced to teach us to run a TI-84 a handful of years later. Abstinence may have worked for you, but its going to do more harm that good on a larger scale. Thats just history repeating itself. Must have skipped that day back in college.
Better, they’re going to go home and jump right back on the dopamine train because a) you kept it from them all day and b) you arent taking the time to teach them appropriate attention management techniques. And then you get to start the same fight the next day. How productive. How worthwhile for the kids. Might as well quit the second and third jobs with the amount of gratitude you’ll have rolling in.
Again, go substitute. I am sure that there are tons of openings near you.
Your lack of critical thinking skills and ability to comprehend what you read might hamper you, but it would help you realize that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Maybe I should come to your workplace and tell you how things work.
I actually do substitute at my local community College. We have a saying here in the welding shop. If you cant do the job, teach. I tell my students that learning a skill is valuable even if they cant use it. Just like the phone in their pocket, its useful beyond the direct application. At worst, they can pass on the skills and experience to someone who can use them. I figure giving back is the very least I can do to keep the world spinning. And the very least is teaching, funnily enough.
Nobody pays me except the school, same as you. The same school paid by the state for each student you have.
The difference is my students choose to be here. I dont have slave catchers to go out and drag them in when they decide to do other things. If I drop the ball in my classes, they can drop the class and go do other things. Can yours? Gun to your head, can you say for certain your kids would choose you over going to the beach or seeing a movie? Hell, attendance is only 40% of the grade for 24 classes. Most of mine could skip two weeks and not even blink. I point this out to them every semester, tell them I get paid either way. The only person who loses is them. How many no shows do you think I have?
Sure, let’s just “unschool” all the children. As adults, we are never expected to pay attention to things we don’t find interesting or do things we don’t want to do, so that’s not a skill we need to teach children.
Yes, suggesting that its wrong to take a students property instead of teaching them to use it is the same thing as saying all children shouldn’t have to go to school. Im glad you could use your masters degree to gymast yourself into that position. Actually, you’ll have singlehandedly solved school shootings. Can’t get shot in class if you arent in class.
Taking a away the phone during school hours is another band aid.
Practicality, there isn’t a single solution that will stop the shootings, a dozen band aids is better than doing nothing.
You can get rid of the phones, could invest that 150k into to the salary of a school therapist, pay teachers more so they aren’t all depressed and overworked. Hire more teachers so classes aren’t 30+, maybe they’d be able to focus on a kid for more than 3 minutes a day. In other words actually fund education.
But sense that none of that is likely to happen this decade,
I don’t like the idea of taking away kids ability to call 911 in an emergency. This isn’t 1980.
Classroom phones are an option, but many have switched to voip and rely on some major internet service not being randomly down that day. Supposedly they’d work with 911 no matter what, but I wouldn’t rely on that.
Could switch to dumb phone or set up parental controls to block internet access, and various apps, during school hours, while still allowing phone calls.
I’m seeing alot of comments about how this will or won’t work for how much the price is, but this made me think of something else.
Don’t we give kids chromebooks/devices anyway. I assume the point of these lockers is to force kids to pay attention, but chromebooks are waaaaaay worst than any phone a parent gave them.
You can threaten a kid to take their phone away, but you can almost argue you can’t take the chromebook away because that’s where all their assignments, tasks, books, notes, etc are all stored. And from my experience, people were always goofing off on other sites or playing games. Unless the school is able to monitor and lock down those chromebooks (which if we’re being honest, have the bare minimum of parental controls), then this is just throwing money at a fire instead of, I dunno, paying teachers better to actually help kids learn instead of moderating their tiktok addictions
