New smartphone-free guidelines for Monongalia County Schools?
Hey – they’re in the bag, Mitch Channell called out Tuesday.
Or rather, in the pouch, the principal of Clay-Battelle Middle/High School said.
“Our school is small enough that I was able to personally hand each one out to our kids so we could go over everything,” he said that afternoon.
Channell is referring to the high-tech, magnetic pouches the district is deploying this school year to keep students away from their smartphones during the day.
Tuesday was the roll-out in Mon.
From here on out, students will drop their phones in their district-issued pouches at the start of the school day – where the devices will remain until the end of the school day.
Then, they will be unlocked by a teacher or administrator with a special anti-magnetic implement.
Said pouches are the design of the Yondr company, which was founded in San Francisco in 2014 at the height of the smartphone boom.
Mon’s district purchased the pouches at a cost of $150,000 after a successful tryout last year.
South Middle and Suncrest Middle were the pilots for the project, Deputy Schools Superintendent Talerico said previously.
Teachers in both schools reported that students were less distracted in class, the deputy superintendent said.
Educators also heard more real-life, legitimate “lols” – as students, they said, were simply more engaged.
“That’s what we really wanted,” Talerico said.
Talerico fully expects, she allowed with a chuckle, that some students will try to game to system, such as, say, locking an old phone into the pouch over the new upgrade that was just bought.
“We’ll have all kinds of things like that,” she said, “but we’ll figure it out.”
The real takeaway, said Talerico, a former elementary school teacher and principal, comes in the form of actual interaction – body language, facial expressions, nuance and all – as she discussed earlier.
Meanwhile, parents of children with special medical circumstances who rely on phone apps for monitoring need not worry, the deputy superintendent said.
A student who is diabetic and uses a smartphone to chart blood sugar levels, she said, will have access by way of a Velcro pouch.
“Kids will have their phones the whole time,” she said. “What they won’t have is the distraction.”
The new guidelines, at least on the first day, got a good reception at Clay-Battelle, the school’s top administrator reported Tuesday.
“We’ve got a great group of kids out here,” Channell said.
“They know it’s understood about their phones,” he said.
“And they caught on quick when it came to working the pouches – but this is their generation.”
