As more school districts and states create policies and legislation that limit the use of cell phones in the classroom, proponents and opponents continue to bring compelling arguments to the table. But for most, it isn’t black and white.
“It’s a very difficult answer here because sometimes you can look at it from a few different facets. Number one is from a safety perspective, having a cell phone in a classroom would enable you to perhaps during an emergency have better communication with first responders,” Stephen Kowal, Chief Commercial Officer of Nextivity, a telecommunications company, told Campus Safety. “But when you look at it from a learning side, from the teacher’s side, it definitely can be very distracting. And I’ve seen inside a classroom, some teachers embrace it where they’ve used connectivity as a way to help them do research and taught them how they were going to use these devices in the real world.”
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Instead of an outright ban, many schools have established processes that put cell phones out of immediate reach of students while still making them quickly accessible during an emergency or for educational purposes. And it doesn’t have to be complicated.
“Some educators today are using very rudimentary ways to deal with this. The school that my son goes to, some of the teachers, when you check into the classroom, there are shoe holders on the wall and they’ve got to check their phone into that shoe holder,” Kowal described. “So they cannot have it in their physical possession but it’s in the classroom, which means if they are doing something that requires perhaps some external research, they can go get their phone during that 15 minutes of time. Or if there is an emergency, the phone is in the classroom and they can get it. I really applaud the teachers that are looking at this from maybe a creative perspective about how to have a happy medium.”
The Dangers of Banning Cell Phones in Schools
When thinking of an emergency scenario where a student having immediate access to their phone could potentially save lives, many people automatically think of active shooters. However, there are other incidents that are far more likely to occur where cell phones would undoubtedly be beneficial (3:47).
“Think about things like medical emergencies. It’s not always that the parents have kept their contact information up to date inside the logs for the school, but I guarantee that that child’s phone has the emergency contact of their parents inside of it. So if you had a medical emergency for the child and you needed to call out, you don’t even need to know passwords anymore — you can just put it right up to their face and you can say, ‘Call mom’ or ‘Call dad’ and it’s going to dial out. The phone contact is probably the best set of contacts that a child has.” said Kowal. “If something happened to the teacher during a medical emergency, you want to be able to call out. I know that they could run into the hall and get another teacher but I think medical emergencies are an area that we should be looking at here.”
Improving 3 Types of Connectivity in Schools
In order for cell phones to effectively be used in schools, both during an emergency and as an educational resource, schools must have reliable cell signals. Historically, K-12 schools and colleges and universities have notoriously poor cellular coverage. Many educational buildings were erected well before cell phones were invented, and therefore materials used are often not conducive to connectivity.
“The way that they’ve built buildings, and especially schools, there’s not a lot of windows and they’re made with materials meant to last a really long time — we’re not building new schools all the time. These are all things that impact cellular coverage. These are large volumous areas, big halls, lots of classrooms,” Kowal described. “And so schools that are getting built today, the new ones are thinking about cellular connectivity inside of the building, but the older buildings have to retrofit and sometimes that can be very expensive for them. And so you’ve got to balance the need for cellular connectivity with the expensive for cellular connectivity.”
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There are two additional types of connectivity schools need to consider, says Kowal, including connectivity for first responders (6:37).
“When a first responder gets to a site during an emergency, it’s very important that the radios that they use are going to work when they go into the school. So those are not cellular, they’re traditional seven or 800 megahertz radios. It’s called public safety systems or ERCS systems,” Kowal said. “A lot of municipalities throughout the United States today are making schools go back and retrofit those because if there is an event at a school, you’ve got to have connectivity for your police officers.”
The third type of connectivity is private cellular. It’s something Kowal says not many schools are thinking about today but will be in the near future (7:10).
“If you think of things like the Apple Vision Pro, those goggles that they’ve just come out with, I believe schools are going to begin to implement those for learning. You don’t just talk about the Great Wall of China, you can put the virtual goggles on and you can be on the Great Wall of China and kids can be immersed into this learning. I think that’s the next way we look at it,” Kowal predicts. “I think learning will go that way and they’re not going to want to have public cellular to support those. These devices provide mobility and the Wi-Fi network can’t handle it. It’s a big burden on the IT department, but what you can do is put in a private cellular network for those devices, keep them native to cellular, but not allow them to communicate to the outside world. And those are the three things that I think schools need to think about. Public cellular, private cellular and public safety.”
Cellular Connectivity in New School Buildings
Although it is more cost-effective to construct a new building that provides strong cellular connectivity versus retrofitting it after the fact, Kowal says that isn’t always happening, noting cellular connectivity is often pushed down the priority list (8:16).
“[Builders] are having the exact same conversation you and I are having right now about where does cellular fall — is it above or below Wi-Fi? Is it above or below the mantraps to have people come into the door and be able to secure the building? Is it above or below IP cameras to watch what’s happening? Is it above or below things like vape detection?” said Kowal. “So sometimes it gets pushed to the bottom and will get value-engineered out which is a real sad point because it’s probably about 50% more cost to come put it in after the building is built. I think things like you are doing right now, guiding the conversation around all aspects of cellular connectivity will allow it to stay in the new build budget, allow it to be in the original CapEx budget for that building, which means that we’ll have more schools with more coverage, which will mean more safety, more enablement of learning through the phones, and again, being able to control that inside the classrooms up to the educator.”
In this discussion, Kowal also shares: