Educating young people today is a full time job for all schools in American. Many of our students come to acim not prepared to learn. They are in need of extra motivation to get them on the right track. Schools are taking on more and more challenges as they educate our children. The lack of positive support from parents is also at an all time high. To make matters worse, schools have no input on policies that directly affect their job. One of the policies that has a tremendous impact on education involves allowing students to bring cell phones to school. This article will attempt to explain how cell phones are a distraction to the educational environment.
Our country is experiencing a breakdown in our K – 12 educational systems. The dropout rate is higher than ever before. When you compare our educational system with those of other countries, we are not in the top twenty. What has happened to our system? There are many reasons for our decline, but this article will deal with one. Politicians have made a lot of decisions that have been detrimental to our education system in the United States. Allowing students the opportunity to bring cell phones into our schools has been very destructive.
Before discussing the pros and cons of cell phones in the schools, we need to examine what the decisions of the politicians (who are non-educator) are doing to our educational system in this country. When politicians change a law that will have a widespread and direct impact on millions of people, it would seem more appropriate to get some input from the people who have to enforce the new policy.
I have been in education for over thirty years, and every time the politician or central office administrator decides to make a major change that will impact the local school, schools are never included in the decision-making process. The local school is always required to implement the change without input. This type of decision making has not worked and something needs to be done. Yet, for some reason, our country still continues to make policy changes from the top-down. When will we ever learn?
Now, let’s discuss cell phones. Let’s ask ourselves, “What is the purpose of having a cell phone in school?” Some argue that the phone is a must in schools because of home emergencies. If we ask each parent how many emergencies have they had in a school year, the number would be very small. If there is a “true” home emergency, why can’t the parent call the school and let the school facilitate the communication? I do believe the contact will be handled quickly and in a less disruptive fashion. In the past, the schools have always handled emergencies and there were no problems. What has changed?
If an emergency occurs in the school, the school would rather not have students calling parents and getting them all upset before the problem could be investigated. It may not be an emergency at all. If it is an emergency, it may require the school to have a special alert that could involve everyone in the community. So the bottom line is that students who call parents without permission generally don’t have full knowledge of the problems. Sometimes the student can actually make the emergency worse. Often times when parents get the information from their children, the incident has been blown out of portion. When a major incident does occur in a school, the agency that needs to be notified first is the school district’s security office and/or the local police department. Parents can sometimes get in the way of solving the problem, or they can make the situation worse by becoming part of the problem.
