Fairfax County Superintendent Michelle Reid is creating a pilot program for storing cellphones in classrooms or lockers during the school day.
The school board voted Thursday night to require Reid to develop the program.
In Virginia’s largest school district, middle schools have an “away for the day” cellphone policy. They can’t be used at all, but there is an exception for academic use.
For high schoolers, there’s more discretion. Phones are supposed to be away during class time and if a student goes to the bathroom. The school district’s cellphone policy is included in its Student Rights and Responsibilities document.
However, At-Large School Board Member Kyle McDaniel said enforcement appears to be inconsistent across schools and classrooms.
The plan, which McDaniel said could be presented to the school board by the end of the summer, comes as educators across the country grapple with how to prevent the devices from becoming a distraction.
Proponents of strict cellphone policies argue students shouldn’t have access to phones during the day in order to maximize their learning. Critics, though, argue that parents should be able to contact their kids during the day, especially if they have safety concerns or if the student has a job or cares for a sibling.
“We’ve got to address this because it’s really devolved into the Wild West out there,” McDaniel said. “We can’t have that going on in Fairfax County and in our school system.”
The logistics of the plan are still unclear, but McDaniel said they’d likely be tied to the policies for each grade level. For middle schoolers, there could be centrally located cellphone lockers. When students leave for the day in the afternoon, they’d get their phones back.
For high school, where phones can be used at lunch and in the hallways, “you would have to have some type of secure storage within classrooms,” McDaniel said.
Some Fairfax County teachers have already taken that approach, using hanging shoe racks and requiring that students put their phones into one of the slots when they enter the classroom.
“Every teacher, in addition to all of their teaching responsibilities and all of their administrative responsibilities and all their other disciplinary responsibilities, we now throw the added requirement on top of them to enforce the cellphone policy in their classroom,” McDaniel said.
“And we aren’t giving them any centralized guidance or even equipment to do that.”
Teachers in the county, McDaniel said, seem to be taking different approaches. One teacher gives out candy bars to students who take out their phones the least, he said.
“I’ve heard more about cellphones than I have anything else so far this year,” he said.
There are competing perspectives, McDaniel said, for when phones should be allowed during the school day.
“There’s all these different competing points of views, and they’re all valid,” McDaniel said. “The saddest one that I’ve heard, quite frankly, and it’s really unfortunate this even has to be a consideration — ‘How do I talk to my child if there’s an active shooter in a school?'”
Last month, nearby Loudoun County Public Schools said it was seeking parents’ input on a draft policy for student cellphone use there.
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