Ditching phones during school
Ditching phones during school
San Mateo High School, a public school in California, has started locking up students’ phones during the school day to eliminate distractions.
It’s a Friday afternoon. You’re sitting at a Harkness table in Centennial. English class. The last class of the week.
You’re trying to pay attention, your focus shifting from various grammatical terms to the football game that night.
Your phone buzzes in your pocket, the perfect distraction. You have to check it.
Has your favorite NFL player been traded?
Does your friend want to hang out tomorrow?
Has your club meeting been canceled?
You figure you can sneak a quick peek the next time the teacher turns his back.
Twenty minutes later, you’re in the Upper School office, explaining why you violated the Acceptable Use Policy.
San Mateo High School in California has implemented a new phone policy completely prohibiting the use of cellular devices during the school day.
Students magnetically seal their phones in pocket-sized pouches when they arrive on campus and unlock the pouches at the end of the school day.
“Everyone else was socializing and eating lunch together,” Brad Friedman, a teacher at San Mateo High School, told ABC News. “That’s what I wasn’t seeing enough of when phone usage was at its worst.”
Unlike San Mateo, Upper School students here are allowed to use certain aspects of their phones but only in certain common study spaces.
“The phone is a tool to be used for certain purposes, for Quizlet or whatever else it may be,” Associate Headmaster John Ashton said. “So, the thinking was, identify those social gathering places and have the guys do it there versus opening up all of campus.”
Although students are allowed to use their phones for academic purposes while in the Centennial second-floor lounge, the Science Foyer, the Hoffman second-floor lounge and the Senior Lounge, the library, intended to be a space for quiet study, is a strict no-phone zone.
“In the library, if a kid really needed to use his phone and knew he was going to get it confiscated if he took it out,” Technical Services Librarian Teresa Katsulos said, “he would come and ask one of us [the librarians] if he could use his phone, and we’d give him an office to have some privacy.”
The Acceptable Use Policy has evolved over the years, alongside vast improvements in technology.
After all, the first iPhone only became available in 2007.
“We added mobile devices at one point to the Acceptable Use Policy because it wasn’t a thing, but we always had the Acceptable Use Policy,” Ashton said.
Smart phones, although sometimes distracting, have many benefits for academic use.
“These are computers in our pockets, and they’re great devices for calendaring, for note-taking, for accessing assignments in support of everything you’re doing here,” Ashton said. “The point being to acknowledge that these are incredible tools that should be used and that we use all the time.”
San Mateo’s new policy has raised several safety concerns. In case of a family or school-wide emergency, unlocking devices have been placed in all classrooms.
According to ABC News, all 1,700 students are able to unlock their phones within a few minutes.
“In our community, I feel it wouldn’t be good to keep a kid’s phone from him in case of an emergency situation,” Katsulos said. “If there are weather-related emergencies – we hear the tornado or fire alarm go off – they need their phones. In a school shooting situation, God hope that never happens here or anywhere else, but the world being what it is, would you like to take those extra couple minutes to get your phone unlocked? I wouldn’t, and I have a son that goes to school here.”
The privilege of using phones at school can be counter-productive as well, as there is a real potential to distract students from interactions with peers.
Phones can steal attention from teachers during class as well as prevent students from using free periods to start homework or go to teachers for help.
“We need to use [phones] and learn to use them responsibly,” Ashton said, “not just use them and give up all other interactions and relationships and eye contact and hanging out with friends. We don’t want to create a culture where we’re walking across the Quad, and everybody’s just on their phones.”
Smart phones also have the potential to distract students from school work.
“San Mateo deciding to completely free their students from the distraction of phones could lead to a more focused student body,” sophomore Evan McGowan said, “but the practical sense of getting rid of phones entirely is too extreme, in my opinion.”
Schools in China and France have banned phones in public schools, but in the United States, San Mateo High School’s phone policy is the first of its kind for a major public school.
It’s the largest American public school to completely ban phones so far.
“Every school has to make up guidelines and rules and expectations that are right and work for their school, and they’re different places,” Ashton said. “So, what would work for one school might not work here. What we do here may not work for another school.”