From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens adjusting to the smartphone ban

There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.

Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.

Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.

Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.

Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.

I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.

If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.

The correct thing to do here is your teachers position is to laugh at the idiot kid telling them about their legal liability.

The school may be taking some on, but if it’s a school policy short of actual gross negligence by the teacher she had none personally.

Even if the school had liability the correct response to such nonsense is to tell the parents to sue them. Most will not, and you defend to the death the few that do so others understand the cost of bringing frivolous lawsuits for silly reasons.

This whole nonsense of entire school systems grinding to a halt and lacking any implementation of common sense due to made up liability fantasies is ridiculous. Let those highly paid admins do their jobs and take on risk.