AOL News – NEW YORK (May 12) – A ban on cell phones in the nation’s biggest school system is creating an uproar among parents and students alike, with teenagers smuggling their phones inside their lunches and under their clothes, and grown-ups insisting they need to stay in touch with their children in case of another crisis like Sept. 11.
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My thoughts? Should they be used in class? Absolutely not.
HOWEVER.
(You know, there’s always an “however” with me) I know that kids have been going to school without them, and the kids and parents made due. But the technology is here. It’s not going away. Schools need to recognize that – embrace it somehow even.
Kids have more autonomy these days. Sometimes I think it’s a good thing, sometimes a bad thing, but it’s there. Parents need a way to get ahold of their kids. In this day and age, with the economy the way it is, many households can’t afford for a parent to be home.
I’m one of them. My children are too young for cellphone – and to be home alone. But what about when they’re too old for babysitters? I need to be able to get ahold of them. I need to check on them to make sure they are where they’re supposed to be. I need to be available to them to talk when they need to talk, or if they run into some kind of jam in life.
One system that is not mentioned is since they’re going to have metal detectors anyway… Have a check in system. That way the kids can have them before and after school.
I’m sorry, but I have to work. And in those hours before and after school that I may not be with them, I want to have open communication. It’s as simple as that.
IT’S NOT ABOUT CELLPHONES
There’s been a lot of talk in New York recently about cellphones. Specifically by parents of New York schoolchildren, who want them to be able to keep them when they go to school.
Possession of cellphones by students in school have been against the rules in New York for years, but many schools had a “don’t use, don’t search” policy – school personnel would confiscate phones used on school property during school hours, but would not search students for cellphones that were not visible or in use. This created a workable compromise between the rules and the wishes of parents, who felt it was essential to be able to get in touch with their kids on the way to and from school.
This tacit compromise was destroyed (possibly unthinkingly) by the mayor, who announced a policy of unannounced metal detector scanning at ten random middle and high schools every day. Although the announced purpose of the scanning was to prevent weapons from entering city schools, it was made clear that the police would seize anything found that violated the Department of Education’s centralized discipline code – and that included cellphones.
This touched off a firestorm from parents, some of whom didn’t see anything wrong with police searching their kids at the schoolhouse door, but couldn’t see how the mayor could be so heartless as to deprive them of their link to their progeny. After all, the searches were all about their kids’ safety, and so were their phones. So where’s the problem?
The problem is that it’s not about safety, and it’s not about cellphones. Whether there’s a rule against possessing a cellphone in the city schools isn’t the issue. The issue is the needless invasion of our kids’ privacy: it’s teaching our children that submitting to an intrusive search of your person is the price to pay for getting an education in the U.S.A.
What the cellphone flap does do is bring it home. Many people these days think of government as that benevolent daddy who keeps you safe, and civil liberties as frivolities that law-abiding people shouldn’t need anyway – until something happens to make them realize that anybody – even “nice people” – can find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
The cellphone issue may be one of those things. It ought to wake up the parents of New York City’s children to the fact that just because something seems obvious to them doesn’t mean that the government has to agree with them; and that the only thing that can protect them and their kids against arbitrary rules are limits on how those rules are enforced. Those limits are our Constitutional rights.
After all, in today’s national climate, cellphones probably won’t be the only things we’ll be told to give up (one example: reproductive freedom seems like it’s on a lot of people’s lists). The mayor thinks we ought to get used to being searched; I think we ought to get used to fighting for our civil liberties, instead.