With the new school year, some new policies have been introduced that have proven to be controversial throughout the SHS student body. This year, SHS administration decided it would be best to eliminate personal technology during the school day.
Principal Erin Short has been the head principal of SHS since 2010.
“I think it is rather simple,” Short said. “We don’t want to hear or see electronic devices, earbuds, cellphones, anything, between 7:50 and 2:55.”
This policy is not completely foreign to SHS. Prior to 2020 and the COVID-19 lock down, a very similar policy was in place. The SHS administration decided during the 2023-2024 school year to consider a new policy for the next year.
“After the pandemic we made some decision to kind of soften the policy a little bit because of the mental health of our kids in America,” Short said. “We had been talking about it and when the governor came out and told schools they had to have a policy to limit cell phone rules in the classroom and building, that’s what we decided.”
There were multiple factors that Short identified that encouraged them to rewrite the technology policy.
“In addition to it being required by law, teachers were complaining about kids being off-task in class, and we had a significant uptake in harassment and bullying through social media.
“I am a realist so I know that students certainly don’t love it, and they probably don’t like it, but I think our student body has been tremendous,” Short said. “They’ve come in, they’ve followed it. And we have confiscated very few electronic devices, which is what we want. Our goal isn’t to be chasing kids around and taking their devices from them. I have had multiple students from multiple grades come to me and say, not that they loved it, but they have been able to focus more in class and they are not off task.”
Teachers have also noticed changes in the behavior of students. Nicole Geiger, science teacher, has taught at SHS for 11 years now.
“When I started here I remember that if we saw someone with a phone in the hallways we had to take it to the office,” Geiger said. “This is actually reverting back to the way it was in 2013, so it doesn’t seem that strange to me.”
Geiger has gone through the adoption process and was taught about the brain development of children and what effects that.
“For me personally, and I am with the extensive knowledge of screen time, brain development, frontal lobes, social behaviors and all the psych and trauma training through foster and adoption,” Geiger said. “I feel like there are volumes of research that prove that phones and screens are a detriment to us socially.
“It is a detriment to our attention span, it promotes anxiety and mental illness. I think that for as much as the benefits, there are also some negatives that we have started to see once we loosened up the phone policy. I know there was a spike, I can tell there was a spike in behaviors ranging from annoying to dangerous. Now I have had kids have more conversations, more conversations with each other, more interaction.”
Students also feel strongly about the new policy, but in the other direction. The Courier offered a survey to the entire school. Throughout 394 responses, 86.8% of respondents selected that they “did not like the Electronic Device Policy.”
Throughout the responses, many students stated that they believed the policy was too restrictive and even unnecessary.
“Sometimes I try to contact my parents in between classes, and it’s really hard without having a phone and having to go down to the office each time,” senior Kaitlin Wang said.
Despite any objections, the policy is not going anywhere. Though, not everyone is against the new policy.
“I like that everyone is much more open to engaging with one another (ie: at lunch, in class, etc) rather than being distracted by a phone,” an anonymous responder said. “I’ve also noticed that people seem to be having more fun together without the presence of phones, and that our social skills and communication have improved even over the short period of time we’ve had the policy.”
Although not all students claim to agree with the policy, there are still many benefits from the new policy.
“I think COVID socially stunted people and made us go into high anxiety, hiding in your phone mode,” Geiger said. “Even as an adult, I know I dabble with phone addiction. What I’m seeing now is a school that is a community, not just people who are immediately on their phone.”
