Middle school removes bathroom mirrors to stop kids from making TikToks::Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina has taken drastic steps to reduce the time kids spend outside of class.
Middle school removes bathroom mirrors to stop kids from making TikToks::Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina has taken drastic steps to reduce the time kids spend outside of class.
In a school shooting situation, cell phones could make things much worse. During my active shooter training, we were told to ask students to turn them off if we were in a shooting. The noise is an obvious danger, but the lines need to be kept clear for communication with emergency response personnel. There would be structured ways that the school would want to communicate with you - they don’t want the chaos of parents showing up to an active scene. I think it would be better to rely on things like the Rave app.
In other situations, the front office is there. That is the function that they have served for generations. Give the office aides something to do.
There’s just little reason for students to have smart phones in school. They cannot control themselves. We are asking them to have more self restraint than most adults do. It is not developmentally appropriate and it is harmful.
When I was a kid, there were pay phones so that kids could make calls for when they wanted to be picked up. And we had landline at home so that if you needed to make a call, you could.
Those things don’t really exist anymore. And now we have phones with apps that monitor medical conditions like diabetes. Let’s single out those kids?
So make the office staff stay after hours so that the kids with after school activities can make a phone call? Yeah, because fuck the school staff, right?
The horse has already left the gate. You’re not going to get it back.
At my school there was an office phone outside the office that anyone could use. No need to staff it.
504s exist for kids who need them for medical purposes. (Had a diabetic kid - her mom made sure she knew the phone was only for monitoring) While there aren’t pay phones; there is a landline in the office at every school that students will be able to use.
The office workers are hourly and are already scheduled to stay for at least an hour after school. That’s part of their job.