Students’ phones will be taken at the beginning of every period to combat chronic cell phone usage. To comply with the new rule, students must also turn Apple Watches on airplane mode or power them off and keep their AirPods in their backpacks.
No exceptions will be made for classes where students rely on phones to complete their work, and students cannot receive their phones with teacher permission.
“Art classes are going to have to find a different way of doing things,” Principal Ellen Reilly said. “[For] band, some of the kids use theirs as the metronome. Everything is going to be put away.”
Along with the new phone regulation, additional measures have been enacted to discipline students who access their phones during class.
The first time a student is caught with a phone, administrators will call their parents. At the second instance, security will take their phone for the day. The third time, the student’s parent must pick up the phone for their child.
Reilly believes the cell phone ban, coupled with the new discipline measures, will enhance student learning by stimulating discussion without distraction.
“It will de-stress more kids during the class time, so that they’re able just to focus on just the work at hand,” Reilly said.
However, senior Max Bishop is frustrated by the “grossly authoritarian” ban, arguing that it will be detrimental to McLean’s learning environment.
“This eliminates any trust there was between students and faculty because now students aren’t given the choice to not use their phones in good faith, it’s just assumed that they will use them,” Bishop said. “Second, there are still a million and one ways to waste time in school, you really can’t make someone work if they don’t want to. And of course there’s what students are supposed to do in an emergency, but I think that’s much less prevalent or frequent of an issue in comparison to how this affects students on a daily basis.”
Bishop said the greater student body mostly agrees with him.
“I think one would be hard pressed to find a student who doesn’t object to this policy on some fundamental level,” Bishop said.
McLean is one of 16 FCPS schools piloting the new phone disciplinary system. Eight schools, including McLean, will institute phone storage and the other eight will keep student phones in backpacks. McLean will be compared against a school with similar demographics in order to determine the effectiveness of the policy.
The change in McLean’s cell phone policy was made in response to teachers repeatedly reminding students to put their phones away.
“I equate it to whack-a-mole,” Reilly said. “[Teachers] say it’s just constant that you’re always looking out to the audience and somebody’s picking up their phone.”
Technology and engineering teacher Libby Settlemyer approves of the new phone ban.
“It’s always ‘phones away, earbuds out,’ and [students] might follow that for about five minutes, \and then, you know, they creep back in,” Settlemyer said. “Now, I will say this is a class where I have needed students to take photographs of their work from time to time. I am going to have to come up with an alternative solution for that, but their computers also have a built-in camera, so they can take pictures that way.”
According to social studies teacher John Dowling, students used to take their phones out dozens of times per class.
“I am very pleased that we’re going this route,” Dowling said. “Phones have made it almost impossible for many students to focus in class and get anything done, much less learn anything. I believe that in time, the vast majority of our students will actually come to enjoy that time away from their screens because they can do their schoolwork during school and use that time productively.”
