by Teagan Cofie
As a new school year begins, new rules and legislation kick in with it. The beginning of the 2024-25 year school marks the becoming of a phoneless JHS school day.
On July 1, 2024, the official “No Phone Law” was put into effect, affecting JHS and all other Indiana public schools.
The official law “Requires each school corporation and charter school to:
(1) adopt and implement a wireless communication device policy that governs student use of a wireless communication device; and
(2) publish the policy on the school corporation’s or charter school’s website. “
According to Harvard University, “the presence of electronic devices in the classroom is not, in and of itself, the problem. Rather, it’s the way we incorporate electronic devices into situations in which we are already inclined to pay attention to too many things.”
Research from the Pew Research Center shows that about seven in ten (72%) teachers say that high school students being distracted by phones in the classroom is a significant problem. So now with the policy in place, JHS hopes to reverse any potential poor effects devices in school could have caused.
Although the legislation may seem redundant or unnecessary to many students, some teachers, including English teacher Allison Clary, implemented their own “no phone rule” prior to the state-wide ban.
“At the end of the year two years ago I was ready to quit. I was ready to throw in the towel…I’m going to be honest, I couldn’t stand to look at those kids anymore at the end of the year, but what I realized, it wasn’t really the kids; it was the phones,” Clary said.
But when Clary started implementing her own rule and seeing results, she contacted principal Pam Hall to ask if she could share her findings with the school staff.
Clary addressed the whole faculty and told them “just how important it was” and “how it had saved everything for me, and that if we are all on board with this it’s going to work a lot better.”
She said that even her students have seen the benefits of limited phone usage.
“I had so many students say… that even though they didn’t like it at first, it was something that they grew to love, that they appreciated that if all their teachers had done it, they’d have straight A’s across the board because they were so much more engaged.”
Hall said that she thinks that the policy will help improve classroom settings as all teachers use the same strategy.
“The feedback that we’ve got from teachers is that students aren’t really pushing back,” Hall stated when asked how teachers and students have responded. “They come into the classroom and they know the routine and the procedures. There’s attendance, they put their phones up and they get started with the lesson. I think it’s really been a pleasant surprise for our teachers.”
The law is straightforward on what the state of Indiana wants to be done for its education, but it gives freedom of how each school may put it into practice.
Hall and leaders of other schools in the area communicated and received their opinions on what they were planning to do in their schools to adhere to the new law.
As stated by Hall, GCCS leaders tried to find “common pieces” as they implemented the new law, but “each school is able to implement what works best for them.” There is “not one consistent message.”
But already, our school is finding that the absence of phones has made visible improvement compared to previous years with staff receiving adequate feedback from teachers and students on how this has and will benefit the classroom and learning across the board.
“I mean, I’m very proud of our students here because you know, we’ve had very few cell phone disciplines where we’ve had to send kids to ISS on there and I’m just very thankful for them being a partner with us,” said Hall.
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