>No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen.
Almost never happen? There have been 464 school shootings in the US since 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
Almost never happen? There have been 464 school shootings in the US since 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
And then there's the question of how a cell phone is actually supposed to help in such an emergency. If anything, I think it would be a liability.
Obviously, knowing his class was ok was a huge relief, but also being able to talk to dad helped him calm down a bit.
Still a niche case
Your link shows ~600 people injured or killed in school shootings, across every possible education level (from kindergarten to college) in the course of 24 years. (Both injured and killed, the number actually killed is more like a quarter to a third of that).
That's an average of 25 people killed or injured per year.
Taking enrollment numbers from 2021 (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...) , it shows that in a given year, ~80 million people are enrolled in those same school levels.
That puts the odd of being injured or killed in a school shooting (if you're currently in school) at 1 in 3,200,000 per year.
So yes, odds of one in three million of your child being involved is "almost never happens".
many people shot are not killed. being a victim of a school shooting does not even mean you were shot.
That is to say, it almost never happens.
The few incidents that do happen garner outsized media attention because they are unquestionably tragic. That repeated messaging makes them feel more common than they actually are.
For comparison, fatal car crashes on the way to or from school are FAR more common than school shootings (while still rare.)
Teachers and staff have phones. I’d be willing to guess that most schools still have a hardwired phone in most classroom.
Besides which, "having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents.
Disagree. Being able to communicate to your family or emergency services that a shooting is happening and/or that you are safe or not is invaluable.
>"having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents
How could you possibly conclude that? Look at any timeline of a school shooting and there's often a lot of information going from 911 calls to inform the police on the number of shooters, the shooter's location, and where students are still alive/hiding. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timelin...