Frontenac junior Jaxon Varsolona hasn’t heard many complaints from his fellow students about not being able to have their phones throughout the day.
“I think everyone respects our administration, and they know it's not their rule that they put in,” he said. “There's not much we can do about it.”
Previously, Frontenac students couldn’t have their phones during class but could have them during lunch. A similar policy had been in place at Pittsburg High School, but now the state law requires students to have their phones off and stored somewhere for the whole day, including lunch.
If students at Frontenac bring their phones to school, they have to keep them in their lockers. That's also what students at Pittsburg Community Middle School do, while students at PHS have to keep their phones in their backpacks since that building doesn’t have lockers.
For Addison Stanley, another junior at Frontenac, it was fairly easy to adjust to the change this year. While she wishes she could still have her phone at lunch, she does like talking face-to-face with other people during that time.
“It feels like we're connected in a way, being off of our phones,” she said. “Because your phone can control a lot of how you think, and things you see online can change the way you might act.”
She and Varsolona both have parents who work for the district, so communicating with them throughout the day hasn’t been an issue for them.
Addison’s mom, Brandy Stanley, is the superintendent. She said it’s worked well for other parents to send messages to their children through the front offices. Parents of high schoolers have also been emailing their children, which the students can access on their school-issued computers.
“When there is a break in class time, they can check their email,” Stanley said. “That's not anything that's been very disruptive.”
Pittsburg USD 250 is also having parents send messages to students through the front offices. According to superintendent J.B. Elliot, the only issue parents might run into is having to wait if there are other calls ahead of them.
“But I haven't received any emails or phone calls with that being an issue at the district office, which tells me it's being handled or managed appropriately at the building level,” he said.
Elliot also said it’s been easy for teachers to enforce the policy because the expectation is the same in each classroom. Students are also talking to each other more during breaks and lunch, and they are more engaged during class.
“They don't feel like they're pressured to keep up with what's going on on social media,” he said. “They can actually focus a little more during the day.”
While the feedback has been positive and Elliot understands the reasoning behind the law, he still wishes schools had more input.
“It was kind of gray, for example, on where students keep their phone to be inaccessible because that looks so drastically different from school to school,” he said.
Stanley also feels this way. The high school students at Frontenac have a semi-open lunch where they can walk to restaurants downtown. Stanley was worried about them not being able to communicate with the restaurants beforehand.
“So there are challenges when there's a mandate that comes down that doesn't take into consideration things like a small school with open lunch,” she said. “If our businesses hadn't been flexible, that could have been a big problem.”
According to Stanley, no phones have been confiscated so far at Frontenac. Elliot said that some have been at Pittsburg, but it’s not happening very often. The consequences vary from school to school and are outlined in the handbooks on Frontenac’s district website and Pittsburg’s district website.
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