Phone home

I was homeschooled from kindergarten through my senior year of high school.

I didn’t get a cellphone until I went to college, and I didn’t get a smartphone until my junior year of college.

I missed out on cultural moments such as Flappy Bird and Trivia Crack. I was oblivious to Vine and Snapchat, back in the day when you could see who everyone’s top friends were.

Back then, I hadn’t been conditioned to check my phone every few minutes, so keeping it in my pocket for 45 minutes during class wasn’t too hard.

Are phones a distraction? Yes. Do schools need to keep them out of classrooms? In most cases, yes.

The Campbell County School District has been tasked with the privilege of creating a policy on cellphones, thanks to a bill that was passed this legislative session.

Who do we have to thank for this piece of legislation? Well, not Rep. John Bear and Sen. Troy McKeown. Both of them voted against this bill. Reps. Abby Angelos and Reuben Tarver voted for it, as did Rep. Ken Clouston and Sen. Eric Barlow. Quite an interesting voting split, if you ask me.

Cellphones themselves aren’t inherently bad. It’s what we choose to do with the phones that seems to be a problem.

For some reason, a handful of local conservatives, including county commissioners and city council member, are adamant that high schools need a full cellphone ban.

Respectfully, I don’t care what the commissioners and city council members have to say about the policy. Back in their day, phone numbers didn’t even have seven digits.

As it stands right now, the district will implement a full ban at all schools, which ignores a survey of school staff, parents and students that had more than 4,000 responses.

What did the survey say? Only 4% of the parents of secondary students — 39 of the 957 — said that smart device use is never appropriate in school. And only 10% of school staff said cell phone use is never appropriate during the school day for all grade levels.

According to school board chair Lisa Durgin, there’s at least one high school in Campbell County that tried a full cellphone ban and eventually went with a bell-to-bell ban.

Now, I don’t have a dog in the fight, or a child in the school district.

But just based on this number, it seems to me that a total cellphone ban would go against the majority of the survey’s respondents. Imagine teachers having to enforce this policy. It’s going to be a mess.

City Councilman Jack Clary supported a full ban and seemed confused why teachers didn’t agree with him. He claimed that teachers who support a full ban are too scared to speak up.

So much for listening to the community. Yeah, they’re all too scared of saying how they feel about cellphones in an anonymous survey.

They say you can manipulate statistics to support whatever point of view you’d like. But it’s hard to read this survey and come to the conclusion that Gillette wants a full cellphone ban.

But that’s the play here, I guess. If the numbers don’t line up with your worldview, just dismiss them. If it’s good enough for the president, it’s good enough for local government.

Let’s say the school board goes with what 10% of the teachers supported and implements the full ban. The schools will have to follow that policy, and we’ll see how it goes. But 10% of teachers? And 4% of secondary parents? That number is ridiculously small to be dictating policy.

In the 2024 general election, about 11% of Campbell County voters supported Kamala Harris.

I’ll just leave it at that.