As the new school year starts next week, students at the Middletown City School District in Orange County, New York, cannot use their cellphones anytime during the school day.
Before the school day starts and after it ends, students can use cellphones. But during the school day, including lunchtime and passing periods, students must turn off and put away their cellphones, according to the policy.
The new policy applies to all district students, about 7,000 in total, ranging from kindergarteners to high schoolers.
“It is our belief that this is going to be a powerful shift inside the district. We want scholars to be engaged in learning and capitalizing on the resources that we have inside our schools. It makes it really hard to do so if they are consistently distracted by a cellphone,” Middletown City School District Superintendent Amy Creeden told The Epoch Times on Aug. 31.
Creeden said the policy would also help foster face-to-face interactions among students instead of social media-based interactions.
During the two town hall meetings on the new policy in August, parents opposing the ban focused on emergency contact.
Milly, a Middletown District parent who didn’t disclose her last name, told The Epoch Times at a local back-to-school event on Aug. 20 that she prefers to immediately reach her daughter and son through their cellphones in cases of emergencies.
Creeden told The Epoch Times that the district has sufficient security measures in place. Each classroom has a phone that calls directly to 911. Moreover, students can carry cell phones during school days as long as the phones are turned off.
“If there was a real emergency situation, they would have their cellphones on them,” she said.
According to the policy, students who violate the rule will have their cellphones collected; only a parent or guardian can pick up a collected phone.
“We are not looking at it as ‘there is a disciplinary issue, shall we take away cell phones?’ That’s not what this policy is for. We are looking at it as a positive step towards equipping our scholars, our young people, with the skills they need for life success,” Creeden said.
“Social media use has become quite a situation for school administrations across the nation to grapple with. It is our hope that we can spend more time supporting scholars instead of investigating disciplinary issues over social media use.”
Creeden said the district would evaluate the net results of the policy by the end of the year.
In January, two middle schools within the district—Monhagen and Twin Towers—first enacted the new cellphone policy.
Six months later, the district announced that the policy would expand to the entire district. Parents were advised to prepare students to transition to new cellphone use habits.
The district’s old policy banned student cellphone use during tests and classes as well as within locations of privacy such as bathrooms and locker rooms, according to a cellphone use policy adopted in July 2015.
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