30 ms·

My kid just graduated from a NYC high school that had a complete ban on phones in school. The kids checked in their phones at the front desk on the way in and g

My kid just graduated from a NYC high school that had a complete ban on phones in school. The kids checked in their phones at the front desk on the way in and got them back when leaving. It was by no means watertight -- many (most?) kids had a "burner" phone that was dead or broken or whatever that they turned in (because nobody would believe a highschooler who said they didn't have their phone with them lol) and they kept their real phone. But at least the expectation was set that you can absolutely not ever be seen using a phone in class. Overall I think it was a good policy. I don't think it's workable at large schools. In NYC at least you simply can't tell families that kids have to leave phones at home -- they are an essential tool for safety and travel, especially for younger kids. My 12 year old can take the subway to school by himself, but ONLY if he has a phone in case he ends up in some wackadoodle situation where his train has gone express or is on another train line and he needs to call his lifeline (me!) to figure out how to work it out. But they do not need to have them in the classroom.

verve_rat 3y ago
Did 12 year olds take the subway to school 20, 30 years ago? (Genuinely asking, never lived in a place with a subway, but took the bus all the time at that age.)
- obscurette 3y ago
  I can't tell about NYC, but they certainly did in Europe and still do. It's probably not too common though, most of kids have school close to their home.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    What does close mean? So close that they can walk there instead of using the subway?
    - edu 3y ago
      I can speak of my case in Barcelona, I used to walk to schools since I was around 11-12. A 20 minutes walks in a pretty centric location, also took the seldom bus/metro to go there or visit some friend.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        Okay, but presumably most school kids don't live in pretty centric locations.
        orwin 3y ago
        In my country, middle schools are small, so a 10k city can have 3-4, and most kids do indeed live in centric locations, which mean only a fourth of them at most don't walk/bike there. Also, you get assigned a public school depending on where you live (the closest) so unless you go to a private school, you're going to the closest one.
        derefr 3y ago
        Schools in Western countries have "catchment areas" — a Voronoi diagram, for each level of schooling, that clusters residences by which school is closest to them. If you're sending your child to public (rather than private) school in one of these countries, then your child is assigned to a school based on which catchment area your home falls into. You can't send your child to a school other than the closest one to you. (Yes, this means that a large part of housing prices in these urban areas is driven by parents or soon-to-be-parents fighting over the housing that exists in the catchment areas of the best public schools.) This is usually combined in civic planning with a "service radius" around the school, to decide when new schools are needed (vs. just expanding existing schools.) For rural areas, the service radius is defined by practicable bus pickup loops (you don't want a bus that takes an hour to get to the school); but in dense urban areas, that radius is usually defined by walkability — on little child-sized legs! The combination of the concepts of "catchment area" + "service radius" means that if you live in a city in one of these countries, it's almost impossible that you're going to live somewhere where your child fundamentally cannot walk to school (purely in terms of distance.) Which is a major reason why everyone makes fun of people in cities in the US (which uses both of these concepts in most municipalities) for driving their kids to school, when that school is by law a distance away that the kid could walk. (I know that the problem in the US often isn't the distance, but what's between the home and the school — dangerous major thoroughfares with no sidewalks cutting through neighbourhoods and the like. Which is still the US being dumb; just on a different level.)
    - monomers 3y ago
      From own experience, yes. When I switched to 8th grade it was a bit further, so I biked there.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      In the Netherlands, elementary, primary and secondary schools are all in walking or cycling distance (and we have good cycling infrastructure), that is, elementary schools are in <5 km radius from residential areas, secondary schools <10 kilometers, which is doable in about half an hour of cycling. For follow-up education - and this is generally from age 16 onwards - you often need to head to a near city or provincial capital, but the government offers a free public transit scheme if you need to travel for that. Personally, my preschool was literally around the corner (a five minute walk, although I had tiny legs), primary school was a 500 meter walk, secondary school was a kilometer, tertiary education one (associate's degree) was in the next town over (5 kilometer bike ride), tertiary education two (bachelor's degree) was in the province capital (25 kilometer bus ride). IMO this is how towns and communities should be designed.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  30 years ago i rode my bicycle to school on public roads. without a helmet.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Around here 6y old kids take the bus.
- clsec 3y ago
  I took SF MUNI to & from school in second grade. I took GG Transit to the city from 9-14 y/o and then MUNI when I got there. I also took the ferries and BART fairly regularly as well. All by myself.
- mtalantikite 3y ago
  Of course, all the time. I didn't grow up in NYC, but all my friends that went to school here took the subway or bus to middle or high school on their own. I've been in the city for a decent amount of time now (16-ish years) and I've always seen lots of young kids on public transit after school lets out. I grew up just outside of Boston and my parents let me take the commuter rail to north station and the T over to Cambridge with friends as an early teenager. It never felt like a big deal, you just learned to read a subway map and a train time table. If you got lost you asked for directions.
  - mtalantikite 3y ago
    Very much unclear why I got down-voted for a pretty uncontroversial comment? I guess people didn't like that I took the train as a kid in the 90s before smartphones?
- narag 3y ago
  In Madrid my son did, ten years ago.
- supernewton 3y ago
  20 or 30 years ago, there were pay phones everywhere. I might not have carried a phone in middle school, but I did carry quarters that I could use to call my parents if anything ever went seriously sideways.
  - matt-attack 3y ago
    I don’t let me kids have phones and I force them to be out and about in town on their own (way smaller town than NYC). I tell them I’d they ever need to get in touch with me, just find the nearest stranger and ask to make a call. Literally anyone would let a kid call their mom. They have my number memorized.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  People I know who grew up in NYC - most of whom were in primary school 30-40 years ago - mostly took the bus or the subway to school, yes, unless it was close enough to walk.
- delfinom 3y ago
  Yes, we did. NYC even gives out student Metrocards that provide free transit to kids. I took a 30 minute ferry ride and then subway to school each day in NYC ;) And kids still do it. Heck, outside my middle school in NYC, they had a line-up specifically for regular transit buses that were scheduled to stop there just when school let out. The only kids that qualified for yellow school bus service were those that lived more than a half a mile from a bus/subway stop.
- pbjtime 3y ago
  Absolutely. And the funny thing is, it was more dangerous then. It is an objective fact supported by all available data that there are fewer kidnappings today than ever before. But since s kidnapping in Topeka goes around the world in 30 seconds, people hear more about all kidnappings happening everywhere, and think they are happening more often.
retrac 3y ago
> My 12 year old can take the subway to school by himself, but ONLY if he has a phone in case he ends up in some wackadoodle situation where his train has gone express or is on another train line and he needs to call his lifeline (me!) to figure out how to work it out. I was taking the subway to school by myself at 12 in Toronto (maybe a slightly less intense city, to be fair). I'm not sure about NYC but in Toronto it's possible to teach a kid a set of strategies where they'll basically never get dangerously-lost. Just find the nearest bus, and get on it. Stay on it until it arrives at a subway station. Ask a transit worker at the station if necessary. Get on another bus or subway that gets you a little closer in the right direction. It can take a while but you can follow this algorithm rather blindly and it will get you there. (The system was designed that way, I think.) I never got lost. And if I had gotten lost, I wouldn't have been in any particular danger. At a certain age they'll have to figure out "oh, there's no bus, what do I do?" on their own. (At the time, I did not like this whole take the subway on my own thing - scared the heck out of me. I had to be coached with multiple trial runs.)
- rainclouds 3y ago
  Turning red is accurate /verified. The only place I’ve personally witnessed wide spread mass transit use for youth in school is Japan. Totally normal and feels safe.
  - ryder9 3y ago
    yeah.. definitely no mass female groping problems.. hell even guys are being groped nowadays from what ive been told
    - vacuity 3y ago
      While that is unfortunate, it's not an argument against mass transit in general.
      - sneak 3y ago
        It's an argument against school-aged children riding mass transit unsupervised.
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
For an emergency lifeline phone, a non-smartphone would be more robust, be far cheaper and have longer battery life.
- merb 3y ago
  for diabetes sensors you need to have a phone with android or ios to use the app which sends data to parents/doctors (stuff like dexcom)
  - joombaga 3y ago
    Most of them have a receiver option too. Dexcom does. They're another cost though, and quite expensive for what they do (~$400 for the G7 receiver). They don't have Wi-Fi though, so they can't upload data (at least for Dexcom).
    - merb 3y ago
      well in germany you get the dexcom "for free", but I'm not so sure about the reciever. my sister basically just bought an older used iphone for my niche and used that which was way below the price point and my sister also wanted to know the datapoints (and sometimes needed to sent them to a doctor) so the phone was basically a must.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    If the other 99% of kids want their parents to gift them smartphones too, I suppose deliberately cultivating diabetes does show dedication to the cause.
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  Apple watches?
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Lasts for less than a day, and are they independent these days or do they need a paired phone?
tomjen3 3y ago
Phones are much easier to solve problems with, but your kid doesn’t need you to call. He can ask the workers for directions.

verve_rat 3y ago

Did 12 year olds take the subway to school 20, 30 years ago? (Genuinely asking, never lived in a place with a subway, but took the bus all the time at that age.)

obscurette 3y ago
I can't tell about NYC, but they certainly did in Europe and still do. It's probably not too common though, most of kids have school close to their home.
- cubefox 3y ago
  What does close mean? So close that they can walk there instead of using the subway?
  - edu 3y ago
    I can speak of my case in Barcelona, I used to walk to schools since I was around 11-12. A 20 minutes walks in a pretty centric location, also took the seldom bus/metro to go there or visit some friend.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      Okay, but presumably most school kids don't live in pretty centric locations.
      - orwin 3y ago
        In my country, middle schools are small, so a 10k city can have 3-4, and most kids do indeed live in centric locations, which mean only a fourth of them at most don't walk/bike there. Also, you get assigned a public school depending on where you live (the closest) so unless you go to a private school, you're going to the closest one.
      - derefr 3y ago
        Schools in Western countries have "catchment areas" — a Voronoi diagram, for each level of schooling, that clusters residences by which school is closest to them. If you're sending your child to public (rather than private) school in one of these countries, then your child is assigned to a school based on which catchment area your home falls into. You can't send your child to a school other than the closest one to you. (Yes, this means that a large part of housing prices in these urban areas is driven by parents or soon-to-be-parents fighting over the housing that exists in the catchment areas of the best public schools.) This is usually combined in civic planning with a "service radius" around the school, to decide when new schools are needed (vs. just expanding existing schools.) For rural areas, the service radius is defined by practicable bus pickup loops (you don't want a bus that takes an hour to get to the school); but in dense urban areas, that radius is usually defined by walkability — on little child-sized legs! The combination of the concepts of "catchment area" + "service radius" means that if you live in a city in one of these countries, it's almost impossible that you're going to live somewhere where your child fundamentally cannot walk to school (purely in terms of distance.) Which is a major reason why everyone makes fun of people in cities in the US (which uses both of these concepts in most municipalities) for driving their kids to school, when that school is by law a distance away that the kid could walk. (I know that the problem in the US often isn't the distance, but what's between the home and the school — dangerous major thoroughfares with no sidewalks cutting through neighbourhoods and the like. Which is still the US being dumb; just on a different level.)
  - monomers 3y ago
    From own experience, yes. When I switched to 8th grade it was a bit further, so I biked there.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    In the Netherlands, elementary, primary and secondary schools are all in walking or cycling distance (and we have good cycling infrastructure), that is, elementary schools are in <5 km radius from residential areas, secondary schools <10 kilometers, which is doable in about half an hour of cycling. For follow-up education - and this is generally from age 16 onwards - you often need to head to a near city or provincial capital, but the government offers a free public transit scheme if you need to travel for that. Personally, my preschool was literally around the corner (a five minute walk, although I had tiny legs), primary school was a 500 meter walk, secondary school was a kilometer, tertiary education one (associate's degree) was in the next town over (5 kilometer bike ride), tertiary education two (bachelor's degree) was in the province capital (25 kilometer bus ride). IMO this is how towns and communities should be designed.
inconceivable 3y ago
30 years ago i rode my bicycle to school on public roads. without a helmet.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
prmoustache 3y ago
Around here 6y old kids take the bus.
clsec 3y ago
I took SF MUNI to & from school in second grade. I took GG Transit to the city from 9-14 y/o and then MUNI when I got there. I also took the ferries and BART fairly regularly as well. All by myself.
mtalantikite 3y ago
Of course, all the time. I didn't grow up in NYC, but all my friends that went to school here took the subway or bus to middle or high school on their own. I've been in the city for a decent amount of time now (16-ish years) and I've always seen lots of young kids on public transit after school lets out. I grew up just outside of Boston and my parents let me take the commuter rail to north station and the T over to Cambridge with friends as an early teenager. It never felt like a big deal, you just learned to read a subway map and a train time table. If you got lost you asked for directions.
- mtalantikite 3y ago
  Very much unclear why I got down-voted for a pretty uncontroversial comment? I guess people didn't like that I took the train as a kid in the 90s before smartphones?
narag 3y ago
In Madrid my son did, ten years ago.
supernewton 3y ago
20 or 30 years ago, there were pay phones everywhere. I might not have carried a phone in middle school, but I did carry quarters that I could use to call my parents if anything ever went seriously sideways.
- matt-attack 3y ago
  I don’t let me kids have phones and I force them to be out and about in town on their own (way smaller town than NYC). I tell them I’d they ever need to get in touch with me, just find the nearest stranger and ask to make a call. Literally anyone would let a kid call their mom. They have my number memorized.
nerdbert 3y ago
People I know who grew up in NYC - most of whom were in primary school 30-40 years ago - mostly took the bus or the subway to school, yes, unless it was close enough to walk.
delfinom 3y ago
Yes, we did. NYC even gives out student Metrocards that provide free transit to kids. I took a 30 minute ferry ride and then subway to school each day in NYC ;) And kids still do it. Heck, outside my middle school in NYC, they had a line-up specifically for regular transit buses that were scheduled to stop there just when school let out. The only kids that qualified for yellow school bus service were those that lived more than a half a mile from a bus/subway stop.
pbjtime 3y ago
Absolutely. And the funny thing is, it was more dangerous then. It is an objective fact supported by all available data that there are fewer kidnappings today than ever before. But since s kidnapping in Topeka goes around the world in 30 seconds, people hear more about all kidnappings happening everywhere, and think they are happening more often.

retrac 3y ago

> My 12 year old can take the subway to school by himself, but ONLY if he has a phone in case he ends up in some wackadoodle situation where his train has gone express or is on another train line and he needs to call his lifeline (me!) to figure out how to work it out. I was taking the subway to school by myself at 12 in Toronto (maybe a slightly less intense city, to be fair). I'm not sure about NYC but in Toronto it's possible to teach a kid a set of strategies where they'll basically never get dangerously-lost. Just find the nearest bus, and get on it. Stay on it until it arrives at a subway station. Ask a transit worker at the station if necessary. Get on another bus or subway that gets you a little closer in the right direction. It can take a while but you can follow this algorithm rather blindly and it will get you there. (The system was designed that way, I think.) I never got lost. And if I had gotten lost, I wouldn't have been in any particular danger. At a certain age they'll have to figure out "oh, there's no bus, what do I do?" on their own. (At the time, I did not like this whole take the subway on my own thing - scared the heck out of me. I had to be coached with multiple trial runs.)

rainclouds 3y ago
Turning red is accurate /verified. The only place I’ve personally witnessed wide spread mass transit use for youth in school is Japan. Totally normal and feels safe.
- ryder9 3y ago
  yeah.. definitely no mass female groping problems.. hell even guys are being groped nowadays from what ive been told
  - vacuity 3y ago
    While that is unfortunate, it's not an argument against mass transit in general.
    - sneak 3y ago
      It's an argument against school-aged children riding mass transit unsupervised.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

For an emergency lifeline phone, a non-smartphone would be more robust, be far cheaper and have longer battery life.

merb 3y ago
for diabetes sensors you need to have a phone with android or ios to use the app which sends data to parents/doctors (stuff like dexcom)
- joombaga 3y ago
  Most of them have a receiver option too. Dexcom does. They're another cost though, and quite expensive for what they do (~$400 for the G7 receiver). They don't have Wi-Fi though, so they can't upload data (at least for Dexcom).
  - merb 3y ago
    well in germany you get the dexcom "for free", but I'm not so sure about the reciever. my sister basically just bought an older used iphone for my niche and used that which was way below the price point and my sister also wanted to know the datapoints (and sometimes needed to sent them to a doctor) so the phone was basically a must.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  If the other 99% of kids want their parents to gift them smartphones too, I suppose deliberately cultivating diabetes does show dedication to the cause.
thatfrenchguy 3y ago
Apple watches?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Lasts for less than a day, and are they independent these days or do they need a paired phone?

tomjen3 3y ago

Phones are much easier to solve problems with, but your kid doesn’t need you to call. He can ask the workers for directions.