Statewide mandate may soon follow
Superintendent Matt Landahl will share the Beacon City School District’s proposed new cellphone policy with the community before the school board’s next meeting on Aug. 19, when it will be discussed.
The board will hold a public hearing the following week, on Aug. 26, on related changes to the student code of conduct. Its members could vote on the phone policy that night.
At minimum, the new rule is expected to ban phones from classrooms at Rombout Middle School and Beacon High School, and altogether from the district’s four elementary schools.
The existing policy, adopted in 2021, allows phones during “non-instructional time” if students follow the code of conduct and the acceptable-use policy. According to the code, teachers and administrators can confiscate phones if students violate the policy.
While members of the school board’s policy committee have worked behind the scenes drafting new regulations, the Aug. 19 meeting will be the first discussion among the full, nine-member board on a proposal. If a policy is adopted on Aug. 26, it is expected to go into effect on Sept. 4, the first day of school for students.
At the same time, Gov. Kathy Hochul on July 15 kicked off a statewide listening tour on phone usage in schools. The governor, who noted that a poll released by the Pew Research Center in June indicates that 72 percent of high school teachers nationwide consider cellphone distractions a major problem, held a roundtable at Guilderland High School in Albany County.
Hochul has said she would propose a statewide policy later this year. After the discussion at Guilderland, she said that a “piecemeal approach,” in which individual school districts enforce their own policies, would not be how she tackles the issue.
Hochul’s office said that additional roundtable discussions will be held in the coming months, but dates and locations have not been announced.
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District parents have asked the Beacon school board to restrict access to phones at school several times in recent months. At its last meeting, on July 22, Jean Huang, a past president of the parent-teacher-student organization at J.V. Forrestal Elementary, requested full-day pouching, using something like the locking pouches made by Yondr.
“Any half-measures, where the kids are still allowed to have phones at recess and lunch will not really solve the problems of bullying and self-harm and all the horrible things that go along with social media and smartphone usage,” she said.
However, another parent, Greta Byrum, a broadband and digital equity professional, cautioned the board about banning sources of information or getting into a “situation where we have to monitor what’s on the bodies of our children.”
She said the district should consider how children would get to their phones in “scary incidents, including school intruders, where I would want to be in contact with my child.”
Landahl said during the meeting that the district’s new policy is being driven by teacher feedback.
“They’ve asked for something to be done in the classroom,” he said. “Our teachers want to be able to do their job and teach, and they don’t want to have to be telling kids to put their phone away 10 times a class.”
Landahl also said that changes to the code of conduct, which will likely involve enforcement of the cellphone policy, would address students disregarding the policy to the extent that “it becomes an issue” but would not include “searching kids for their phones every day.”
Board members spent considerable time discussing a trickier element of the cellphone issue: educating students and parents about responsible usage outside of school. Kristan Flynn and Flora Stadler, the board president, both spoke about situations in which their children felt targeted by classmates.
“I’ve heard it since I’ve been on the board — that a lot of stuff that happens outside of school, mostly on phones, shows up in school,” Flynn said. She advocated holding digital literacy education sessions for students at all grade levels.
“That’s how smoking cessation happened, by educating kids in school about smoking,” she said.
Stadler pointed out the board’s goals of having district graduates exhibit empathy, self-regulation and good citizenship, among other attributes. “No matter what we do with this tool, it’s in their lives forever,” she said. “This is our time to teach them how to be responsible.”
Landahl said this week that administrators are working on an educational component but aren’t ready to share details.
A parent at the July 22 Beacon school board meeting expressed concern that a ban on student cellphones would prevent her from getting in touch with her child in the event of “scary incidents” such as an intruder. But if a parent calls a child while an armed intruder is inside a school, the ringing phone could lead the attacker right to the child. Cellphones are no magic elixir for school emergencies. Districts have professionals who can best protect students.
Jonathan Haidt’s research — specifically his latest book, The Anxious Generation, on how social media and smartphones, the loss of play and community and a culture of “safetyism” have proven detrimental to children’s mental health — has been eye-opening. It is, I suspect, largely what drives these school phone bans.
While I support these bans, we need to educate children on how these technologies work, and how they can be leveraged for meaningful creation and communication, by establishing community spaces where they can gather, socialize and engage in cooperative activities. As columnist Stowe Boyd wrote in The Current in April, despite its 2023 Community Facility and Program Report citing the need for a new or expanded community center, the City of Beacon has taken no action.
At a City Council meeting on May 28, the mayor stated that, with budgeting and bonding, “one of the tactics is you take the item that’s a little bit more lower priority or optional and you just push it back some.… We actually did the same for the placeholder for the community center. You can’t build a community center for $5.2 million [right now]. The most you could do is improve what’s at West Center Street. We still have it in our head what we can afford, but we just pushed it back, because we’re not sure yet.”
As a high school teacher in another district, I see how disengaged and distracted cellphones keep everyone. Even during a recent visit to the Beacon Pool, everyone who wasn’t in the lifeguard chair was hunched over a phone. Obviously, this is a problem. In fact, right now, first thing, I’m on my phone.
At school, parents are notified of emergencies. If every kid were calling their parents during an emergency, it would be a night-mare. I understand the desire for communication but, as a parent, if there were an event at my children’s school, I would race there from work and call parents who might already be there. [via Instagram]
It’s a great idea to ban phones. There’s no gain in having kids scrolling through Instagram while in class. Attention spans are shorter than ever due to cellphones. [via Instagram]
There are good reasons why kids should have their phones. God forbid something happens and we can’t contact our parents because a stupid school makes the dumbest rule without considering the outcome. [via Instagram]
It should be up to the parents to permit their child to have a phone, not the district. Put the phone on the desk upside down and teach. If a kid cannot control their behavior (expectations should be set at home), create a system for effective discipline. The phone is a means of direct communication and an incredible way of gaining information. [via Instagram]
The district should absolutely standardize this. Teachers can’t track phone permissions and police usage. [via Instagram]
This is long overdue. Hopefully the district won’t chicken out or soften. Smartphones have no place in schools. [via Instagram]