Student cellphones will be banned from Philomath School District classrooms with certain exceptions, Superintendent of Schools Susan Halliday announced during a board meeting Thursday night.
“The plan is to attempt implementation at the end of this month,” Halliday said following the meeting. “We’re at the half-year point, so we would go for the rest of this school year and then adjust as needed and move on from there and also watch for what the legislators do.”
Halliday said it appears possible in the upcoming legislative session that there could be bills on cellphone usage in schools, including possible “bell-to-bell bans.” The state legislature will convene Jan. 21.
“We want to start implementing sooner rather than later,” Halliday added, “because we’ve heard the hue and cry of our staff saying ‘it’s killing us trying to be able to manage and monitor cell usage.’”
The school district’s administrative team, which includes principals, have been working on the issue.
“They’re the ones doing most of the dialogue at this point because the biggest thing is our administrators have to help with the enforcement side of it to be able to support the teachers in the classroom,” Halliday said. “So there’s got to be the agreement there of ‘here’s what we agreed to and here’s what we’re committed to.’”
At the meeting, Halliday went through results of surveys that were available to parents, students and staff.
One question asked, “Do you believe cellphones have a positive or negative impact on student learning?” Staff (90.4%) and parents (77.8%) overwhelmingly said yes, the impact on learning is negative. Perhaps not surprisingly, most students (71.2%) indicated that cellphones have a positive impact.
Sophomore Maggie Real, one of the student representatives on the School Board, provided an example of what she has witnessed at PHS and how classmates on cellphones can be annoying.
“Some students don’t even turn their volume down or brightness down like in the middle of class and it’s just like super annoying to hear an obnoxious song playing or something … it’s pretty distracting and kind of takes you out of the element and is kind of frustrating,” she said.
The Philomath School District’s definition of exactly what a classroom ban means has not been finalized. Halliday did say that students will not be required to turn in cellphones and can keep them in pockets or backpacks — they will just not be allowed to use them in the classroom. High school and middle school students will most likely be allowed to use them outside of classroom time, such as during lunch and other breaks.
Some schools have banned cellphones not only from classrooms but from buildings entirely.
“There were some survey people who said ‘why do they need them at lunch … they need to talk to each other,’” Halliday said. “We’re weighing those kinds of things … we need to watch and listen and know how we need to adapt.”
There will be exceptions to the rule, she said. An example might be a teacher allowing students to access their phones to participate in a classroom-structured activity (for example, scanning a QR code to access a specific website as part of a lesson).
Halliday said she also knows that there will be occasions when students who have worked out situation-specific agreements or accommodations with staff will be allowed to go outside of the classroom to access their cellphone.
“We’re not going to hide them away in pouches and things like that but we’ve got to recognize that we’ve got to make some moves,” Halliday said. “We don’t feel like we need to go that far in terms of the history of what we’ve had within our district and the respect and responsibility there.”
The high school actually did purchase pouches for student cellphones and Halliday said some teachers have been using them.
The administrative team plans to meet again next week to work on the plan’s language and educational components and to identify in what areas they need more information.
“We’re getting into the finalization of what the plan would read and what the consequences are,” Halliday said. “We also talked a lot about the differences there would be between an elementary level and the middle school-high school level. The expectations and the availability will probably look different a little bit in both of those settings.”
In other words, the superintendent and administrators have a lot of details to figure out.
“We’ll see where we end up next week in terms of lining out everything to be able to share with students, to be able to share with staff,” Halliday said.
The decision to implement a cellphone ban does not need to be approved by the School Board and per policy falls to the superintendent and the administrative team.
“Our policy says we can make the decisions of whether or not cellphones are allowed and so we don’t have to change anything,” Halliday said. “What we want to do is implement and watch and then if we need to at the end of the year update policy, we will.”
If a policy update is needed on that particular topic, then the board would become involved, she added.
