It’s been roughly a month since the phone ban came into effect.
Phone lockers are empty. Students simply keep using their cell phones during break. Many teachers stopped caring about phone use. Nobody ever leaves class at the last five minutes to pick up their phone. What happened?
Many students do not know this, but NAHS had a cell phone ban just like this, about four years ago; seniors remember it. When a scandalous Instagram account was at its prime, posting countless images of students often without consent, and facilitating chaos that left a bad taste in the administration’s mouth. To combat this, they implemented a phone ban, to stop students from facilitating this account and others like it.
At first it was very effective, as teachers were strict about the ban. After all, the account involved many pictures of teachers without their consent either, so it makes sense that they were very strict with their enforcement of the policy. But as the months passed by, people stopped caring so much and the ban waned in efficiency. The policy was never officially retired, but by the time the 2022-2023 school year rolled by, everyone practically forgot about it. The Instagram account fad where students made various unofficial school accounts also died out, so there wasn’t a real reason to enforce the phone ban much anymore.
This is just like the new phone ban we see today. Except there was never truly any incentive for teachers to enforce it to the same extent they did nearly four years ago, so now we see completely empty cell phone lockers and valuable educational time stripped for no reason at all, dealing with the lockers and having to chop off five minutes of educational time every day. And the ban is now backfiring, causing more damage than it did before.
Now, as students lie about not having their cell phones, meaning teachers cannot reasonably expect students to have their phone on them, since they are forced to be under an assumption that their advisor picked it up, which they most likely have not. That means students now have their phones during bathroom breaks, wasting even more valuable class time for them.
And why would students not lie? Its a genuine security and safety risk to listen to administration and give your teacher your phone. If there was a fire or emergency, the phone will be in the locker by your advisor, and teachers would have to lug around a heavy box full of 20-30 kid phones, while already having to navigate a truly difficult situation. It will be difficult for students to access their phones if there is truly an emergency, and will only cause more chaos and make things more disasters and dangerous, as students who should be neatly lining up with their appropriate class will be running around the blacktop trying to locate their advisor to access their phone.
If a student were to choke or pass out during class, the only people that could call emergency services are teachers. The time it takes for a student to inform a teacher to call emergency services wastes valuable seconds and may cost someone their life.
Not to mention there are so many more risks to not having a cell phone that can incentivize students to keep it in the day. Two-Factor authentication increases online security in an ever-more-dangerous online world, but it requires a cell phone. Cell phone cameras are much higher quality than Chromebook cameras, so its much easier to take a photo of a classmate’s work or the board with one, even if you need to sneak the photo without your teacher catching you . If they need to communicate with a parent to drop off homework that they forgot to bring that day, a cell phone is crucial; email is slow and is unreliable in terms of getting a notification to someone, since not everyone enables email notifications in this day of digital spam.
It is a parasitic agreement. To the student, there is zero benefit to listening to administration. And to the administration, they can only pray that students have the conviction to prioritize their education and turn in their phone. And for the students who have the conviction to give their phones in the first place, were they ever really the type to use their phones during class to begin with?
The solution is stupidly easy. Just have teachers collect phones at the start of class, like they have done for years. It worked, at least as good as we could possibly expect a phone ban to work. It had the benefit of a human connection between the teacher and student; there was truly repercussions. If a student who lied about not having their phone was caught by that very teacher having it, the student had the pressure of knowing that they could not be trusted anymore in regards to classwork. That is not to say it worked flawlessly of course, but at least students actually left their phones in there at much more reasonable numbers. Compare that to most phone lockers, which mostly have 0-3 phones in them. This did not involve major security or theft risks (since your phone was always visible to you), and most importantly, worked. Teachers simply needed to be firm to collect everyone’s cell phone.
That is the solution to this problem. But LAUSD did not give our schools this option. This highlights a broader problem, how the wide-sweeping bureaucratic changes pushed by LAUSD often do not benefit schools in the way that the District portrays, but that is an entirely different can of worms.
Generally speaking, if you hear that LAUSD Is introducing a new broad, general policy across all 1543 LAUSD schools, you should be concerned.