Buxton, a boarding school in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is close to wrapping up its first year of a ban on smartphones in classes. The ban started due to teachers being irritated over students’ repeated usage of phones so the school banned them as a solution. Students are instead given a Light Phone which has limited functionality; the phone can make calls, send texts albeit slowly but it can’t load modern applications.
The ban is part of teachers being at constant conflict over students usage of phones, with one survey in Virigina, discovered that about “a third of teachers with telling students to put their phones away five to 10 times a class with 14.7% doing it more than times, the problem isn’t just limited to the US. A middle school in Canada has 75% of respondents thinking that phones are negatively affecting students physical and mental health while nearly two-thirds believing that phones have a bad effect on academic performances.”
Burton isn’t the only one trying to stop the usage of phones in its school(s). In 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics has reported that, “More than three-quarters of schools in the US had taken the move to restrict the non-academic use of the devices with France banning the usage of phones in schools in 2018”. Despite the issues of phones that educators worldwide are having, not everyone agrees with banning phones. One survey in an Illinois school district found that “70% of 295 respondents think that students should be allowed to have their phones at school.”
However, some teachers at Parkdale beg to differ.
Computer Science teacher Mr. Suarez Duran said, “I think it’s a great idea that other districts should follow because students get too distracted on their phones,” said computer science teacher Mr. Suarez Duran. “Once they are in the classroom we want them to pay attention.”
The answer to that would be surprisingly well. Despite the initial panic that students had when the ban was announced many students accepted it and students now agree that the school is better off without phones, as there have been less interruptions during class, more interactions around campus, and less time spent on the phones. The ban also resulted in a surge of students who are signing up for photography class with the enrollining tripling, this is seen to be influenced in part because of the ban. While it noted that there are students who made attempts to sneak phones into their classes, it said that generally phones are hard to spot on campus.
Homeland security teacher Mr. Rodney Boulware feels banning phones in school could be helpful not only academically but socially, too.
“[…] Students don’t pay attention in class,” he explained. “They use it to bully, they use it to cheat, there are too many avenues for them to be misused.”
As of now, there “expectations” at Parkdale for phones to be away, but no set cell phone policy that all teachers follow, as some have cell phone cubbies while others integrate it into their classrooms daily.
