According to state board member Jim Porter, whose district includes southeast Kansas, most schools already had cell phone policies in place.
“I've been visiting with schools about this for the last couple of years,” he said. “And whenever I would meet with small groups of schools and say, ‘do you have policies on cell phones?’ virtually everybody in the room had their hands up.”
The feedback Porter heard from these schools was mostly positive.
“One of the major complaints was that the lunchrooms are louder because kids are actually talking to each other, which I considered very positive,” he said.
While there haven’t been any phone restrictions at Pittsburg Community Middle School, a policy was put in place at the high school last year where students couldn’t have their phones during class but could have them during lunch. The Frontenac school district has had a similar policy for several years.
The new state law prohibits students from using their phones from bell-to-bell, including during lunch. It requires that “all personal electronic communication devices be turned off and securely stored away from the student's person in an inaccessible location during the school day.”
Pittsburg superintendent J.B. Elliot and Frontenac superintendent Brandy Stanley both recommend that students leave their phones at home or in their cars if possible.
Students at Pittsburg High School who bring their phones will have to keep them in their bags since the building doesn’t have lockers. Elliot believes this will still be considered “away from the student’s person.”
“If I have my backpack over my shoulder, and in an inside pocket I have my phone off or in airplane mode where it's not disturbing anyone or I'm not accessing it, we believe that would meet that criteria,” he said.
The middle school building has lockers, so the younger students can use them to store their phones. That’s what students at Frontenac schools will do, too.
“We've tried pockets in the classrooms for phones in the past, and that wasn't an effective way to make them inaccessible,” Stanley said. “So, we are going to implement the plan with phones in a bag in the student’s locker, so that they are not accessible in that way.”
The biggest concern Elliot and Stanley have heard from parents is about their ability to contact their children. That communication will now have to go through a school’s front office.
Elliot compared the change to how schools used to operate when students didn’t have cell phones, and said that parents have always had the option to leave messages with the office.
“I think this is something, it's going to take time, but I think we’ll certainly be able to manage that, for all schools,” he said.
Elliot also said that while it’s not unusual for schools to make changes based on what the state says, those changes don’t always affect students as much as the new law.
For Stanley, the main difference is the state dictating how schools have to restrict students’ phone usage.
“We had a plan that was working for us,” she said. “Sometimes that's the rub, is each school is different, and how each school addresses student needs is different. Local control at the school level is very important to us. I'm not sure what it would be comparable to, but we're always interested in doing what's best for students.”
Porter shares this sentiment. He said he preferred to leave the issue up to the schools since most of them were already handling it, but if some schools weren’t, then he understands the need for the law.
“It needed to be dealt with,” he said. “And most school districts had already dealt with it in some manner, but in the long run, the fact that we're not going to have the distractions of cell phones in schools is going to be a positive issue.”
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