by Janielys Moya
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by Jasmely Padilla Nunez
Imagine returning to school after a day off, walking into the building and being told that you have to give up your phone, without any warning or valid reason as to why they had the right to take it. That is exactly what students at Taft Educational Campus experienced one morning. Taft made a school-wide decision to remove all cell phones from students. In the beginning of the school year, BHSMS gave every student the ability to hold onto our phones as long as we didn’t use them in class. That was reasonable and many students abided by that requirement. However, as time progressed, teachers began to complain about the use of phones during class. A major part of making sure a class full of students don’t use their phones while in class has to deal with the level of structure and authority a teacher has. Teachers with that higher level of structure and authority had little to no issues with students using their phones while in class. Whereas, teachers with little authority and the lack of ability to control their students, struggled to get students to listen when told to put their phones away. The cell phone use during class when instructed to put them away was more commonly seen with lower classmen;students with less maturity and responsibility. Most lower classmen were in middle school or elementary school before the pandemic hit, meaning many of them are young and haven’t reached the same maturity level a Junior or Senior in high school would. Should upperclassmen suffer for the lack of maturity and responsibility lowerclassmen display when it comes to the cell phone policy? Cell phones pose no physical threat to anyone and give students a sense of security and certainty. The Taft Educational Campus has metal detectors to keep students from bringing in harmful objects and the search for cell phones takes away from the need to watch out for those objects. It sounds ridiculous to hear that our metal detectors are used to search for phones instead of objects that can harm us and other students. The extremes to which they take searching to make sure a student doesn’t have a phone is shocking and doesn’t compare to the efforts they make to make sure a student doesn’t bring in something dangerous. Prior to the search for phones, not once did they ever go into your bag and take out all of your belongings to search for anything. As soon as the cell policy was put into place, there were school safety officers going into our personal belongings and taking everything out to ensure a CELL PHONE wasn’t in your bag. Where were all these efforts when searching for actual harmful objects? Cell phones are the only way for us to contact anyone outside of this campus and if they are removed from us, how would we be able to contact others in case of an emergency? Taking away cell phones is a waste of time and takes away from students learning responsibility and having accountability. We spend the majority of our day and lives in school. High school is meant to prepare us for adulthood and nowhere in our adult lives will we ever get our phones removed from us because we won’t stop using them while at a job. You would simply be removed or given a warning and that is it. Part of growing up is learning that there is a time and place for everything and the simple fact that certain students chose not to listen and respect their teachers should not have affected the entire student body. Those students should have had their own consequences so that they would learn responsibility and be held accountable for their own actions. Making schoolwide decisions to address things as minimal as cell phone use is the exact reason why there is so much immaturity and lack of real life lessons seen in school. As stated before, we spend the majority of our lives in school, the least schools could teach us are real life lessons and how to view life in a more mature and adult-like perspective. We don’t go to school to be babysat, we go to learn and to continue growing and evolving as students and as people. We can’t do that if we get things like our phones removed from us when some outlying students refuse to cooperate.It is unjust that the many should have to suffer for the few. |
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