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Comment by chrisamiller | Hacker News Reader

Our middle school has banned phones during school hours, and it's been great. Even though most kids own phones and have them in their backpacks, they aren't seen. There are less problems during classes and kids have to talk to each other during lunch instead of going head down in their phones. Parental pushback has been really minimal - most parents love it, and it's good for the kids.

Making no phones a blanket policy in all schools should be an absolute no-brainer.

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it's all good until that thing that happens at American schools, happens... That is my one hang up here. It would be idealistic to believe that the Police would protect kids, but in reality there are far too many cases of them being grossly negligent in this exact circumstance... in many of those cases, having a phone played a pivotal role in security. I don't want to get too far into details on HN for the sake of keeping things civil, but I hope you catch my drift.

Im sure there is some happy medium solution here, like putting your phone in a basket or cubby or something like that, at the very least. But I think this is something that has to be seriously addressed and considered. Phones are obviously bad for all of us, more so for children whose minds are far more elastic and far more prone to social alienation. The endless stream of notifications is almost at a gambling / casino level. I think you have to address the root cause of that as well

Between teachers phones, intercoms, cameras, and hardline phones there should be plenty of communication equipment available for a crisis. If anything having a phone could put someone in jeopardy by making noise and giving away position or distracting owner. What is the scenario that it has helped? Have police coordinated response based upon students phoned in reports and telemetry?

Not really. There have been phone calls to 911 during school shootings but reading a few reports, it's never made a difference since schools tend to be hardwired straight to dispatch which is most important. Big failings like Uvalde has been terrible response by first responders which is "Push forward till threat has ended."

Yes, parents have been called by students during incident but that generally makes situation worse as parents run to the school causing delays for first responders.

> Big failings like Uvalde has been terrible response by first responders which is "Push forward till threat has ended."

Wasn't the problem with Uvalde that a bajillion police piled up outside the school and then never actually pushed forward?

I was in an American school when 9/11 happened and the school was trying to punish students for calling their parents who worked in the towers to see if they were still alive.

Fucking dictatorship we are in. Let people use technology, especially in an emergency.

>Between teachers phones, intercoms, cameras, and hardline phones there should be plenty of communication equipment available for a crisis.

How does that stuff help when the kid isn't actually at school, but is between home and school somewhere? If the kid can't bring the phone to school at all, then that means the kid can't have the phone on the way to school either. Allowing the kids to bring phones but lock them up during school hours would solve this problem though.

Also, this is US-specific, but what if there's a school shooting? You don't want someone's kid to be able to call their parents and say some last words to them before they're brutally shot, while the entire town's police force is simply standing outside and preventing anyone from entering?

At my school phones were instructed to be off and in lockers during school hours.

This is the policy at my kid’s school. In fact if a student is caught with a phone then the phone is confiscated and only the parent can pick it up from the office.

most kids will likely still carry a phone, likely on their person, and try to sneak occasionally. Others will have their phone in their backpack.

And teachers will still carry phones, which they can hand to any kid during an incident if they need to focus on corralling students.

This decentralization is imo more resilient to a school shooter scenario than a centralized cubby system.

> in many of those cases, having a phone played a pivotal role in security

Do you have an example?

Every case I recall involved kids calling their parents who only got mentioned because they got in first responders’ way.

Uvalde comes comes to mind.

More realistically the phone would be good for calling for advice after you get molested by a teacher. a million times more likely than getting shot. If it's so bad, why not just homeschool?

Or live in a country where the last school shooting was more than 25 years ago?

Seriously this is such a weird comment. You don't want to say "school shooting" at risk of being uncivil but you think kids should always be prepared for a live gunman to walk into their lives. From my perspective, that's the uncivil part of your comment.

"Apply for immigration visas4 and move 'thousands of miles to an entirely new country" is not a realistic solution for most families.

Very valid. A much easier solution available to most families is to vote and change the world they live in.

People can vote for things all day but that doesn’t mean anything could be implemented that would guarantee the end of school shootings. We’re talking about a country with estimated an estimated half billion guns in circulation and plenty of those undocumented.

Dumb phone turned off and in backpack would serve fine for this scenario.

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I'm curious. How did the phones save kids in the last 30+ school incidents in the US this year? Could you share a source on that?

In what world does a kid having a cellphone during an active shooting equal more security?

I’ll wait for specific sources, but that just doesn’t make any sense.

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