Union Public School District trustees are weighing the pros and cons of cell phones in school and whether students should be allowed to have them or not.
In a Board of Trustees meeting last Monday, Superintendent Tyler Hansford told the board the district currently has a no-cell phone rule posted in the student handbook, but no policy has been adopted by the board.
“I actually thought we had a cell phone policy,” Hansford said. “There is no cell phone policy board policy. It’s in the handbook, which is fine. Actually, most districts don’t have a cell phone policy in board policy. They have some sort of procedure, which is what we have.”
The rules on possession of cell phones and other electronic devices by students varies from district to district, Hanford said. Some districts bar students from even bringing cell phones into the schools. Other districts allow students to have phones but require the devices be on silent and stay in students’ bags.
If the district allows students to have their phones, students could be tempted to use social media during class or look up answers during tests. If the district confiscates phones, it takes on the liability of making sure the phone is secure and gets returned to the proper students, Hansford said.
“The other difficult part of this to navigate is you have various schools of thought with the teachers. Some of them are fully okay with in. In fact, they want them to have them because they’re doing different things with them, like reviewing for a test,” he said. “Some of them are fully against it.”
Additionally, there is the teacher’s autonomy in the classroom that comes into consideration, Hanford explained. It would be a disservice to the teachers to deny them a tool they can use.
Regardless of school policy, Hansford said the truth is students have their phones with them at school. The challenge for the district isn’t keeping the phones out of school, which isn’t possible, but what rules to put in place for cell phones and how to enforce them.
“It’s kind like trying to cover an odd-shaped piece with a blanket at some point,” Board president Jeremy Hamm said. “You’re gonna have something sticking out from underneath the blanket at some point. There’s not going to be a tailor-made blanket for anything.”
The discussion on a potential policy was not intended to come to any conclusions Monday, Hansford said. The idea was to get the board thinking about the issue so a policy could be developed in the future.
Also in Monday’s meeting, the Board of Trustees heard from Union Elementary principal Lori Wilcher, who has been working on re-designing the district’s report cards to better inform parents of where their child stands on mastering the skills needed to move to the next grade.
“So, the idea behind this was to take the actual standards and build them into a report card to judge mastery, with a percentage of that mastery for promotion,” Wilcher said.
Instead of the A,B,C,D or F grades next to a subject (Reading, Math, etc.), parents will receive the exact standards teachers are given to weigh student achievement, along with an S (Standards Mastery), N (Needs Improvement) or U (Unsatisfactory).
“We think this’ll give parents a more accurate representation of what your kids are actually able to do,” Hansford said. “Everybody sitting in this room grew up where you’d get a grade, the grades attached to a number and then it’s all averaged out, and that number means something. This is a way to point out the actual thing they can do, and what they can’t do.”
Wilcher said she was still working on adding the standards to some report cards but planned to finish soon.
