A blanket ban on cell phones in schools will hamper teachers and staff too. Plus, the usual reason why jamming is illegal in most countries: dialling emergency numbers!

I wonder if they could wire the jamming system into the fire alarm. Pulling the alarm turns off the jamming.

Why go that far?

Get approval to run your own short-range cell site that has a whitelist of IMEI (or IMSI, if that's not available) numbers, and blocks all non-emergency calls made by any phone that's not on the list.

Put the staff on the whitelist, and give parents the option to put their phones on the whitelist when they're visiting.

I'm not going to pull the fire alarm if my friend is having an epileptic seizure.

We've gone many generations without cell phones at schools with trained professionals who are qualified to handle seizures. You don't need a cell phone to contact someone who can get medical assistance on a school campus.

I don't know how things work where your live, but I'm willing to bet my right hand that there is not a single person in my school that knows what to do in case of a seizure.

Epilepsy training is bog standard for teachers. Just because the kids don't know how to handle it doesn't mean that the teachers won't.

Landlines do still exist.

If only. Our school mandates big tech slavery. Use microsoft and google and more or do not graduate.

I’m not a teenager anymore but have kids in 4th & kindergarten. The amount of technology exposure the 4th grader gets is appalling. That goes right up to addictive little clicky games that remind me of the WoW I spent a year playing.

I get that teaching well is hard, but I cannot rid myself of the feeling that some teachers are leaning on the tech because actual teaching has gotten too hard. For one thing, it seems like they don’t have many options to deal with kids who prevent the others from learning.

It’s just sad all around. I’d put an end to smartphones if I could, and not just in schools.

eh. I was raised watching the iphones go from 1 to 15 while the numbers kinda lined up with my grade levels, so for context I feel like I've seen both sides of the coin when it comes to kids & phones.

I believe in what you're saying, to an extent, and even am grinding my schoolwork with a flip phone, but at this point I think the onus is on the parents to encourage productive habits and make the kid understand WHY the addictiveness is so implicit and dangerous.

if you don't have anything to replace the scrolling with, you will return to scrolling.

best of luck with the kids, imho meditation worked best for me kicking my phone addiction