Before diving into the pros of Perkiomen Valley High School’s Cell Phone Policy, we need to take a closer look at what it says. The main purpose of this policy, as stated in the handbook, is, “To limit the distractions that come with free access to mobile devices in a school setting in a way that respects the developmental, social, and safety needs of high school students.” This means that the school’s administrators want to limit cell phone usage to help benefit our school without completely banning it. Perk Valley’s rule is that students have to have phones in silence and away during academic periods but are allowed to have them out during times like lunch, in between periods, and in study hall. This policy also requires students to put their phones in “phone caddies” if a teacher requires them to, keeping them out of reach.
This policy has been met with a variety of opinions, but teachers are loving it. Madame Fleischer, a French teacher at Perk Valley, said she’s “a big fan of it,” and “It is fair as it is. I have seen so much growth in students since the policy was established: less cheating, more attentive students, and talking to each other.” The points she made, decreases in cheating, increases in attentiveness, and more social students, are big reasons why the school enacted the policy in the first place.
Cell phones in schools nationwide were a big problem when it came to cheating. Common Sense Media even released findings from a survey that found that 35% of teens admit to using cell phones to cheat. A cell phone ban helps lower this by making it harder for students to access their phones to cheat, and while this will never eliminate cheating, schools around the U.S. have found it at least helps.
Attention spans have also been shorter in schools with the introduction of cell phones. Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, studied how phones affect students and found that “we’re losing our capacity to say that the time spent at school is sacred for learning because we’ve disrupted it with constant images, sounds, and actions that detract and distract from the day-to-day mission of instruction.” Teachers around the U.S. have been saying the same thing for years, finding cell phones as a barrier to learning. A ban would help allow teachers to be able to teach students and would help students be able to focus on what they are learning.
Better social skills are also the main reason why a cell phone ban has helped schools. Many teachers in Perk Valley have found that fewer cell phones have forced students to have more conversations face to face. They think that continuing the ban will help increase positive interaction like this and improve student’s social skills.
A cell phone ban may cause students to grumble and whine, but it is an overall positive policy. It helps better our school and students and teachers alike have been doing better with it. So, next time you put your phone in a phone caddy, remember, it’s for the best.