ICYMI: Monongalia County’s school district is going smartphone-free this year.
And the guidelines aren’t being put in place to take something away from students, Donna Talerico said Wednesday.
Rather, the district’s deputy superintendent said, they’re designed to give something back.
As in, conversation: The face-to-face kind.
As in, socialization: The face-to-face kind.
Circumstances, she said, of having to talk it out in real life and real time: opposed to clicking out an electronic missive that could be bullying and blunt — while simply missing the point.
“Truth is, we have a generation of kids who often prefer to interact that way,” she said, related to the above.
“You miss nuance and body language,” the superintendent said.
There’s also the constant command from teachers to “put your phone away,” said Talerico, herself a former elementary school educator and principal.
Meanwhile, the district rolled out the particulars for the new guidelines Wednesday, which are going in to place at every middle school and high school in the district.
Phones won’t be “confiscated” for the school day, she said. Not in the traditional, low-tech sense.
In fact, she stressed, they’ll be in the possession of students the whole time.
Students just won’t be able to access them, save for medical reasons — which we’ll get to.
Instead, the phones will be placed in a high-tech magnetic pouch at the start of the school day which can only be opened by a teacher or administrator at the end of the school day.
Visit the district online at https://www.boe.mono.k12.wv.us/ for all the particulars.
Meanwhile, 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, Talerico said.
Teachers in both schools reported that students were less distracted in class, the deputy superintendent said, and they also heard more real-life, legitimate “LOLs” — as students were simply more engaged.
“That’s what we really wanted,” she 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.”
Parents of children with special medical circumstances who rely on phone apps for monitoring won’t have to figure out what to do, she said.
A student who is diabetic and uses a smartphone to chart blood sugar levels 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.”
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