The power of the smartphone to bring worldwide connectivity to the palm of a hand has transformed people’s daily lives.
In public school classrooms, though, that tool presents a significant distraction. As a result, several Rhode Island school systems have been grappling with how to allow students to use their cellphones only when it doesn’t disrupt their learning. It is not an easy task.
Parents have made it clear to many school administrators that they want their children to have their phones with them in schools.
But research has found that even the presence of a phone that is on is distracting, said Liz Kolb, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who has researched the use of cellphones.
In Warwick, where the city schools are preparing to introduce an updated technology policy this fall, the new plan is to allow cellphones in the building but to require they be turned off during the school day.
School officials are preparing for pushback from students, as well as parents.
The regulations, which have yet to be formed, will establish how principals and teachers should go about enforcing the policy, and spell out what happens if a student is caught with a phone, according to school committee member David Testa.
The school committee will meet to discuss the new policy on Aug. 20. “Our intention is that come September, when school starts, we’re not going to enforce it right away,” he explained. “We’re going to give them a bit of runway.”
Testa said the school system in Warwick now distributes Chromebooks to all students in middle and high schools, which makes the phone less needed for instructional reasons, something that was done in the past and will still be allowed at the teacher’s discretion.
‘Anything that’s going to get us away from looking at the tops of people’s heads is a good thing.’
Maribeth K. Calabro, Providence Teachers Union president
In his first year as a committee member, he saw plenty of evidence that many students were using the laptops and the phones to play games or send messages to friends. “They open multiple tabs,” he said of the Chromebook. “When the teacher comes by, they close that tab.”
The disruptions and distractions caused by cellphones were mentioned several times throughout the lengthy report on the Providence public schools conducted by a visiting team from Johns Hopkins University.
The visits to schools included descriptions of students staring into phones, ignoring the classroom discussion and teachers. This, despite a standing policy in Providence that cellphones “must be turned off during the day.”
According to the report, team members observed in one classroom: “Teachers circulated and could persuade students to do a single problem or question with some prompting, but most students spent most of their time on their phones or socializing, yelling or moving about the room.”
In another school, the team members were told by a teacher: “There’s no penalty for being on a phone. At least 10 phones are out in my class every day. They are FaceTiming and watching Netflix in the classroom with no headphones.”
Angélica Infante-Green, the new state education commissioner, is promising more help. The state will not dictate policies on cellphones, she said, but will work with schools on establishing plans. She identified helping local districts design their own cellphone policies as one of the top five priorities for the R.I. Department of Education in the next 90 days.
Maribeth K. Calabro, president of the Providence Teachers Union, a local unit of the American Federation of Teachers, hopes the new commissioner forces a conversation about cellphone use with the various districts. Cellphone policies need to be set by districts and then carried out uniformly by principals.
“Anything that’s going to get us away from looking at the tops of people’s heads is a good thing,” she said.
Several Rhode Island school systems have revised cellphone policies in recent years. Warwick looked at five systems, including Cumberland and Coventry, according to Testa.
Because the cellphone is the personal property of students, schools have to be careful about what happens when phones are taken from students. In Warwick, the policy will be that penalties for using the phone in school will be “up to and including the confiscation of the phone,” Testa said, but specifics will be designed by the school committee.
All of this may put teachers in the position of enforcers. “Teachers … say, ‘I don’t want to be the bad guy,’ ” Testa said. “But there is no other way it works unless you ban the phone from school grounds. And I think you’ll have a big problem doing that.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island has received occasional complaints about individuals, according to its executive director. It hasn’t had to file any lawsuits but has mediated through letters, explained Steven Brown.
“One issue we’ve dealt with … has to do with school officials confiscating student cellphones and then actually searching the phones, looking at messages, photos and other information on the phone,” he said.
All of that is improper. “It’s one thing to tell the students you can’t have your cellphone out during class time. And to perhaps temporarily confiscate it,” Brown said. “It’s another thing to start prying into the information that’s on the phone.”
Mary MacDonald is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Macdonald@PBN.com.
