Parents debate possible GPS cell phone curb

Mar. 5—Jenea Phillips says that two years ago, she received a text from her daughter that her school was in lockdown when a student brought a gun onto campus.

Her daughter grabbed a pair of scissors to use as a weapon while others barricaded the doors with desks, Phillips recalled.

"Thanks to her having her cell phone accessible, I could support her from home and ensure she was OK," she said. "If our school is the next mass shooting location, I may not get to say goodbye to our daughters and tell them I love them if their phone is not readily available."

Phillips' support of students having cell phones at school came Feb. 20 on the heels of Gilbert Public Schools Governing Board's discussion earlier last month of a possible policy to regulate their use on campus. Staff is crafting a draft policy to bring back to the board.

Thara Tenney and Katey McPherson urged the district to limit students' use of the electronic devices in school.

"Humans are not able to multitask efficiently," said Tenney, an English teacher at American Leadership Academy. "Impulse screen distraction is destructing cognitive development in the classroom.

"This is what I am observing when it is not addressed appropriately. I call upon responsible district leaders to collaborate, troubleshoot and formulate policy, procedure and practices that foster a classroom environment in support of the teacher's role as sole arbiter of their classroom."

Tenney said studies show that children who spend over two hours a day on cell phones had lower test scores.

"These benchmarks are what we use to measure our success and what we use to legitimize the allocations of state and federal funds," she said.

"So that in and of itself should be enough to motivate district leaders to create policy that is in support of teachers being the sole arbiter of the classroom," Tenney continued. "I'm not saying that technology should be banned but the teachers should say when it comes out to be used as a tool for education."

McPherson, an advocate for youth mental health, said that when she taught at Scottsdale Unified School District in 2004-05, she "literally watched childhood flip on its head with the advent of smart phones coming to my campus."

Since then SUSD has instituted for the 2023-24 school year an "away for a day" policy for K-8 students, where they must put their phones in bags or backpacks while on campus.

"We've seen a tremendous decline in our youths' mental health and the sharp decline as well in coping in resiliency issues with face-to-face interaction," McPherson said. "The psychological term mirroring — when we mirror each other and look at each other in the eye and have a conversation is real. Our kids need more of it.

"The Gilbert Goons is sharp proof of this as conflict resolution was not part of their repertoire. They took it to a physical-assault level, lacking the vocabulary that you get from having that mirroring and face-to-face interaction."

A group of largely affluent white youths calling themselves Gilbert Goons have been terrorizing the town, assaulting their peers for over a year.

McPherson said that giving cell phones to kids is "one of the most unsafe things that we've done for our children."

"Phones do not save lives," she maintained. "During an active shooting situation we need kids to be listening to our teachers, our administrators and our law enforcement officials."

Cell phones "actually impede those processes," she said. "We watched in Uvalde as a stark reminder of how phones did not save lives and if those children had been running and hiding and fighting for their lives as they are trained, perhaps they'd still be here."

An 18-year-old killed 21 people, including 19 students at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas two years ago.

According to the National School Safety and Security Services, "cell phone use during a crisis can create less safe school emergency response."

The school safety consulting firm pointed to several examples, including that hundreds if not thousands of students rushing to use their cell phones in a crisis would overload the cell phone system, rendering it useless and that "cell phone use also accelerates the unintentional and potentially intentional spread of misinformation, rumors, and fear."

McPherson said it was good to give kids a reprieve from cell-phone use as their brains are "constantly being inundated with this screen time, the notifications, the academic pressures, all of it is there."

"They're looking for some boundaries around that and I believe we can offer that here in school," she said.