Helicopter parents sue over cell phones
July 14th, 2006 Stewart Posted in Uncategorized |
FWIW, I remember my school having a few payphones for student use during breaks. You could also call your parents from the nurse’s office, the counselor’s office, the principal’s office, or any of another dozen or so locations in the school.
Round-the-clock security of your kids is a responsibility the schools do have to shoulder, and it’s a heavy burden, but that doesn’t automatically translate into “cell phones for everyone!”
A few quotes from the article:
Maybe it is true, as education officials contend, that students have used cellphones to take pictures in locker rooms and cheat on exams, Ms. Colon said yesterday.
“How far would this city go if we punished the majority for the crimes of a few?” said Ms. Colon, who is also the president of the Association of New York City Education Councils.
As much as this parent would like to distract everyone from the issue at hand, the fact of the matter is that parents have zero control over how their kids use their cells, and the schools are obligated to exert some level of control over the discipline and scholarship of their students. This is no slippery slope — The schools are setting a standard for student conduct, as is their right and responsibility. Toys, including cell phones, get taken away from kids.
Isaac Carmignani, who works nights as an electronic technician for the Postal Service, said his only child, Raven, was stranded outside her locked school alone last fall when he was late to pick her up.
Raven, 9, who just finished fourth grade at P.S. 122 in Astoria, Queens, had a cellphone and was able to call her father on his cellphone. Since then, he will not let her leave home without putting the phone in her backpack. “I tell her not to take it out during school, not to show it to anyone,” he said yesterday.
Oh, and if she has a cell, then she can call for a taxi the next time her father forgets to pick her up, right? Why do the parents so often look to technology to correct for their own failings? Apparently V-chips, internet filters, GPS locators and cell phones make perfectly acceptable surrogates for parental intervention, but the children’s own teachers and school administrators aren’t afforded the same level of consideration.
I think the best solution would be that all confiscated phones and devices be held and returned at the end of the day, but these parents would need to take on a tax hike to pay to staff such a system. Since that’s unlikely and unfeasable, the schools are taking the only reasonable action they can in banning cells entirely.
July 19th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
For us, it was a choice of buy our son a cell phone, or park outside the school for an hour or more every afternoon waiting for his activities to be done. Sometimes practice would let out at 4:30pm, sometimes 6pm, never at the time we were told it would be let out, and the students were not allowed to use the phones at school unless there was an emergency. Practice ending half an hour early or running an hour late was not an emergency. (And students were to be off campus within half an hour of their last activity ending.) All parents are not the same and not all parents who equip their children with cell phones are “helicopter parents.” I would have preferred not to buy my son a cell phone, but the alternative was even more disruptive.
Somehow, my son’s school has managed to strike a balance between allowing children to communicate with their parents and keeping cell phones from disrupting class. The students know if they keep their phones turned off and put away, they will not lose them. They certainly will not be treated like criminals for having one. (Several teachers are known to borrow students’ cell phones once in a while.) (And, I monitor the phone logs and my son does not use his phone during the school day.)
July 20th, 2006 at 3:23 am
Thanks for posting, Jenne. I haven’t time for a lengthy response, but I will say that I agree all parents aren’t the same, nor are all children. I do, however, think that’s immaterial to the issue that the schools face.
In the NYC schools, a vast majority of kids (or their parents) can afford cell phones. But having a cell phone is like having a car; it’s a privilege, not a right.
That said, if one in five kids use a cell phone to cheat (and stats from “The Cheating Culture” among others would leave me to believe that I’m being generous with that assessment), to gain an unfair advantage over kids who cannot afford cells, or to simply disrupt the classroom environment with their use, then I see nothing wrong with the school’s administration revoking the privilege for all students. In fact, it’s about the only fair thing they can do.
No, not all students should be treated like criminals. But they do all go through the same metal detectors, don’t they?
When kids were carrying pagers in the 1990s, even the ones who didn’t use them for dealing drugs got them taken away. This is no different, nor should it be, just because it is a convenience for the parents that their kids have cells.