The Cell Phone Issue in Schools is Out Of Control

Sohkor Solanke

This past week, unbeknownst to me, a student took a picture of me with his phone while I was sitting at my computer desk drinking tea. He posted it to his Snapchat page with a caption that seemed mean-spirited, disrespectful, and, quite frankly, racist, because anytime a White person uses the word “dirty” when describing or talking about a Black person, I feel a sense of unease. His action left me feeling embarrassed, exposed, and angry. There were apologies issued by both the student and his mother, but they felt a little disingenuous because the student was still using his phone in class the very next day. He supposedly took down the post by the end of the school day, but I’m sure by then, many students had already seen it.

It is not lost on me that, had I posted a picture of him on social media, I would have been in trouble as our district has policies against teachers doing this without parent permission. Yet, students can take and post pictures of teachers without our knowledge or permission. Let’s face it- I don’t have access to his social media accounts. If not for a kind student giving me a head’s up, I would be a non the wiser, which makes me wonder how many times he and his classmates have done something similar and gotten away with it.

When students are not humiliating teachers with their phones, they are often using them to copy and cheat, and COVID seems to have exacerbated this problem. The COVID generation of high school students got away with a lot of things while doing school online. Now that they are back in the classroom, plagiarism seems to be second nature, and they don’t even go to lengths to hide it. They submit work that is airdropped, copied, and pasted from classmates without even trying to change words and phrases. And thanks to advancements in technology, they now they have AI apps to assist them in their corner-cutting, laziness, and lack of effort. A student didn’t even realize that she had let it slip in a conversation with me that she and her classmates had a text group where they “shared” assignments. I already suspected this to be the case, but her blunder just confirmed it. I even heard that a student in our school was caught taking pictures of the screen during a district-wide semester exam. When parents are informed of this behavior, they seem embarrassed that their child was caught cheating, but they don’t take the phone away.

The phones are a distraction in general. You assume a student is paying attention, only to realize that their long hair is concealing AirPods, and they are actually listening to music. You think they’re reading, only to walk over and notice that the book is being used to hide the phone, and they are actually watching Netflix or playing a game. The constant buzzing and humming of notifications stops students from being fully present as they feel the pull to check and respond immediately to every call, text, and direct message.

Our school policy is that we are supposed to confiscate cell phones. To police this at the high school level, I would require a personal assistant to help me document that I warned the student, confiscate the phones, run them to the office, and contact the parents. Teaching during COVID is already stressful enough without adding this to my never-ending workload. Not to mention the fact that many students will blatantly tell you that you don’t have the right to touch their phone since you don’t pay their bill. Some parents will even repeat this same line, thus enabling their children to disrespect school staff and break school policies. I know that many parents are aware that their children are using their phones in class because so often when I say, “Put your phone away”, the students will respond with, “but it’s my mom- I have to text her back.” Some parents even call their students during class, and the students are bold enough to ask to step outside to take the call. It’s never an emergency. If it were, they could call the office.

Unfortunately, we are also in a catch-22 situation with cell phones as, since Covid, so much of what we do in school is online. We now have access to programs that serve as beneficial auxiliary material to our curriculum, and some of these programs are even a requirement of our curriculum. Textbooks are often available online, and many districts now use online programs such as Blackboard and Canvas to manage assignments and grades. In some districts, each student has access to a laptop, but that is not the case in our district, despite being one of the ten largest in the country. Our school’s computer labs are often locked down for what seems like endless testing. The feasible alternative is for students to use their cellphones in class, but with this also comes some of the aforementioned misuses of phones.

I don’t claim to know the solution to this problem. What I do know is that teachers are at their wit’s end because teaching during Covid has taken so much out of us, and many are leaving the field entirely. The issue with cell phones is just one more thing that is making teaching miserable and shifting the power dynamics in the classroom in favor of the students in a climate that is already anti-public education. For the most part, parents are the ones paying for these cell phones, so they have the power and the influence to talk to their children about the proper use of phones in school, take away cell phones when they are being misused, and teach respect for school personnel.