Much to the displeasure of middle school principals, students in two or three Montgomery County middle schools next year will be allowed to carry cell phones with them even if they haven’t gotten a permission slip signed in advance.
At a county Board of Education meeting that ran late into Monday night, board members voted to support a one-year pilot program to see, as Board member Patricia O’Neill put it, if “the sky would fall” if all sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders were given free reign to take cell phones to school.
“We’ll ask two or three schools to pilot the idea … or we can do what the Army does and make them volunteer,” O’Neill said. “Then they’ll come back after the school year and give us a report.”
For the past five years, district policy has been that high schoolers can carry cell phones carte blanche so long as they shut off their ringers during class time. Meanwhile, their younger counterparts areonly allowed to do so if they have a signed parental waiver that the phone is necessary for medical or safety reasons.
All board members present except for Gabe Romero said educators need to deal with the reality that the phones are around in schools, not hide from it by continuing with the waiver requirement.
“I believe even in a small 800-person school you have 200, 300 kids with phones,” O’Neill said. “Somewhere down the line we made this a hassle in getting a waiver.”
The agenda item was supposed to merely be a discussion item to hear both sides of the debate until outgoing Student Board member Sebastian Johnson introduced a resolution to scrap waivers outright. The resolution, though, was modified to make way for a small pilot program to test the concept of waiver-free phone carrying.
According to school tallies, the 38 district middle schools had an average of 46 students each with waivers last year. Sebastian agreed with O’Neill that far more students are bringing phones to school than that sum, signaling that the policy is just not working.
“There’s a big discrepancy between what we are calling for in our policy and what’s happening in the schools,” he said. “If no one has the waiver you are not getting the message out about proper cell use … so it’s ineffective.”
Edward Clarke, Montgomery County Public Schools safety director, said he has serious safety and security concerns if all middle schoolers are allowed to have cell phones. He cited as an example two incidents in which students used their cell phones to call parents about potential emergencies before administrators could get correct information out.
“It’s like a game of telephone,” Clarke said, “rumors fly so rapidly.”
