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In Ontario/Canada schools banned cell phones with much of any issue at all this year. My friends in the US seems shocked at the fact that kids couldn't have a

In Ontario/Canada schools banned cell phones with much of any issue at all this year. My friends in the US seems shocked at the fact that kids couldn't have a phone during class hours. When I asked why their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting. Which just goes to show how much your environment affects your thinking. I've never once thought or even considered there could be a school shooting at a school here.

myko 2y ago
yep, my kids HS has a cloth rack hanging on the door to place phones in so the kids can grab them when a shooting is happening but doesn't have them during class
- ipaddr 2y ago
  How often is their a school shooting when this would be useful?
  - QuarterReptile 2y ago
    It hasn't happened yet, but if it did, then it still wouldn't be useful.
  - myko 2y ago
    Not one I'm aware of since my oldest has been at the school, but there has been at another in the same city
- Phelinofist 2y ago
  Honestly this is really sad
zozbot234 2y ago
> their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting. If the main purpose is just texting with their parents in case of emergency, they could get an old-fashioned pager for that. I heard that these devices are a pretty severe explosion hazard though.
- Cpoll 2y ago
  You can't send messages with an old-fashioned pager. (There are two-way pagers, but I don't think those were ever common).
bryanlarsen 2y ago
According to my daughter, the Ontario ban had little effect on her high school. Before the ban, some teachers allowed phones, some didn't. After the ban, some teachers allow phones and some don't. Many teachers use internet resources in their classroom, and phones are how the students access those. There are Chromebooks available, but not enough for everybody, and they are in rough shape. And the other daughter's middle school is still the same as before the ban. They previously had a ban stricter than the provincial government's mandate so nothing changed.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  this sounds possibly like a whole lot of things but “ban” is not one of them - maybe something like Ontario “you can do whatever teacher says” thing
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    It's what happens when the bureaucrats instituting a top down "ban" are out of touch with the reality of the situation.
getnormality 2y ago
Do people really think this way? In good faith? They have such a high sense of risk from school shootings that they have to organize their daily activities around that possibility, regardless of whether it may be ruining the learning environment, the entire nominal purpose of school?
- ta988 2y ago
  Yes it is really part of the thought processes of people I have met too. Really strange how the reality can be distorted to make room for guns.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  When you do active shooter drills during school three or four times a year, then yes that sort of creates and reinforces a skewed perspective on the real risk. Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way. Yea this is what I don’t get. How is a cell phone actually going to help when there’s a school shooter? I guess you can throw the phone at his head. There’s pretty much no reason a kid needs a phone in school. If the parent needs to get in touch with him they can call the office like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      they have phones in closets where kids are hiding parents can call to make sure their child is still breathing?! I am 10000% anti-phones in schools but this is silly argument to make. every parent of a child in America worries every day something may happen and when it does time it takes to reach your kid will be the longest time no parent should have to live through
paulddraper 2y ago
Replace shooting with fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, etc IMO the objection is dumb regardless, but maybe that will help translate.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  Fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes do not happen several times a week in the US, unlike mass shootings.
  - paulddraper 2y ago
    Are you talking about at schools or generally? Both happen several times per week, neither happen several times per week at schools.
    - bnj 2y ago
      This source [0] says 81 school shootings in the US as of 12/6/24, so while not quite several times per week on average, it's within the margin of error. [0]: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index....
      - QuarterReptile 2y ago
        You're being down voted because your source links known disinformation sites (detailed elsewhere in the thread.)
zdragnar 2y ago
As an American, I'm at a loss trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in school. Back in my day, all electronics had to stay in your locker except your calculator, including pagers, personal organizers and for the very few kids who were wealthy enough to have one, phones as well. This would be about the time that Motorola and Nokia were selling giant bricks that they called phones. Edit: and no, school shootings had nothing to do with the change. We'd gone through Columbine not long before, and despite the media spamming everyone they're very rare even today.
- ubj 2y ago
  Also as an American, my experience was that the majority of high school students didn't care about the rules on phones. I attended high school when Motorola Razr flip phones were the hot new technology, and kids used them in class all time. People learned how to do T9 texts without looking so they could slip their hand into a backpack or pocket during class. There were even ringtones high pitched enough that adults typically didn't hear them. All of this under the threat of phones being confiscated if caught. I'm not defending the use of cell phones in class. But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them.
  - DaSHacka 2y ago
    > But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them. Arguably those have all been tried, and don't work. I think it's not hard to imagine why algebra may be less captivating than a constant short-form-video dopamine stream for an adolecent.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  rare as in 1,200+ in the last 4 years… https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings that’s about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything else
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    And the vast majority of those are accidental, drive by, and "escalation of dispute" per your link. These are not the kinds of shootings that parents want kids to be texting about, these are run of the mill gang activity. The mass violence shootings that you hear about on TV where anyone and everyone might be a victim are the exception, not the norm.
protocolture 2y ago
My only issue is that its baffling to me that you would deprive kids of a platform that is going to be relatively omnipresent in their lives. Like, a locked down school approved phone that cant load social apps makes sense (And yeah I am more than happy if the tooling is swiss cheese, because we need to inspire new pentesters somehow). But removing them entirely? That seems bonkers.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  This baffles me as well. A large group of people seem to immediately treat it as a foregone conclusion that smartphone bans are entirely positive. Nobody seems to even question the idea that we shouldn't ban things by default. The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right? Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.
  - graemep 2y ago
    We ban lot of things for kids that they have to cope with in adult life. The US even bans alcohol for young adults, and there are few places where someone under 16 can buy it. Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default. IMO we would be better off if adults stopped using it too.
    - protocolture 2y ago
      We do ban lots of things that kids will have to cope with in adult life. But we don't ban harmless tools that kids will need to learn to use in adult life. And you can tell me all about the harms of social media, but social media can be accessed via computer also. Then you will tell me all about how computers are locked down to prevent access to social media at school. Effectively you will go on to describe reasonable controls that schools have decided they simply wont implement in this case. The truth of the matter is technical literacy is in decline, schools have almost completely vacated the space. If teachers are mad at distracted students they can incorporate the distraction into the education (My secondary school did this with classes Excel in for basic financial maths, edutainment games, dedicated computer research lessons for otherwise book subjects) or choose to entirely stunt the kids by removing them. Schools did this same shit to computers, they started by banning them, then incorporating them in lots of meaningful ways. If schools tried to ban laptops at school today we would be up in arms, but lots of "reasonable" people saw it as an easy quick win the last time around. The trick here is to convince schools not to be 10 years behind but to keep up. If that means more funding in you jurisdiction, or higher fees, then do it. I always remember a good friend of mine who was the first in his entire school to write an essay on his Apple II and print it off to hand in to the teacher. He got a zero for "cheating" and swore off computers until he was over 30. I imagine his experience would be familiar to kids caught "cheating" by using their pocket access to all of human knowledge to conduct research.

myko 2y ago

yep, my kids HS has a cloth rack hanging on the door to place phones in so the kids can grab them when a shooting is happening but doesn't have them during class

ipaddr 2y ago
How often is their a school shooting when this would be useful?
- QuarterReptile 2y ago
  It hasn't happened yet, but if it did, then it still wouldn't be useful.
- myko 2y ago
  Not one I'm aware of since my oldest has been at the school, but there has been at another in the same city
Phelinofist 2y ago
Honestly this is really sad

zozbot234 2y ago

> their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting. If the main purpose is just texting with their parents in case of emergency, they could get an old-fashioned pager for that. I heard that these devices are a pretty severe explosion hazard though.

Cpoll 2y ago
You can't send messages with an old-fashioned pager. (There are two-way pagers, but I don't think those were ever common).

bryanlarsen 2y ago

According to my daughter, the Ontario ban had little effect on her high school. Before the ban, some teachers allowed phones, some didn't. After the ban, some teachers allow phones and some don't. Many teachers use internet resources in their classroom, and phones are how the students access those. There are Chromebooks available, but not enough for everybody, and they are in rough shape. And the other daughter's middle school is still the same as before the ban. They previously had a ban stricter than the provincial government's mandate so nothing changed.

bdangubic 2y ago
this sounds possibly like a whole lot of things but “ban” is not one of them - maybe something like Ontario “you can do whatever teacher says” thing
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  It's what happens when the bureaucrats instituting a top down "ban" are out of touch with the reality of the situation.

getnormality 2y ago

Do people really think this way? In good faith? They have such a high sense of risk from school shootings that they have to organize their daily activities around that possibility, regardless of whether it may be ruining the learning environment, the entire nominal purpose of school?

ta988 2y ago
Yes it is really part of the thought processes of people I have met too. Really strange how the reality can be distorted to make room for guns.
SoftTalker 2y ago
When you do active shooter drills during school three or four times a year, then yes that sort of creates and reinforces a skewed perspective on the real risk. Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way. Yea this is what I don’t get. How is a cell phone actually going to help when there’s a school shooter? I guess you can throw the phone at his head. There’s pretty much no reason a kid needs a phone in school. If the parent needs to get in touch with him they can call the office like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    they have phones in closets where kids are hiding parents can call to make sure their child is still breathing?! I am 10000% anti-phones in schools but this is silly argument to make. every parent of a child in America worries every day something may happen and when it does time it takes to reach your kid will be the longest time no parent should have to live through

paulddraper 2y ago

Replace shooting with fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, etc IMO the objection is dumb regardless, but maybe that will help translate.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
Fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes do not happen several times a week in the US, unlike mass shootings.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  Are you talking about at schools or generally? Both happen several times per week, neither happen several times per week at schools.
  - bnj 2y ago
    This source [0] says 81 school shootings in the US as of 12/6/24, so while not quite several times per week on average, it's within the margin of error. [0]: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index....
    - QuarterReptile 2y ago
      You're being down voted because your source links known disinformation sites (detailed elsewhere in the thread.)

zdragnar 2y ago

As an American, I'm at a loss trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in school. Back in my day, all electronics had to stay in your locker except your calculator, including pagers, personal organizers and for the very few kids who were wealthy enough to have one, phones as well. This would be about the time that Motorola and Nokia were selling giant bricks that they called phones. Edit: and no, school shootings had nothing to do with the change. We'd gone through Columbine not long before, and despite the media spamming everyone they're very rare even today.

ubj 2y ago
Also as an American, my experience was that the majority of high school students didn't care about the rules on phones. I attended high school when Motorola Razr flip phones were the hot new technology, and kids used them in class all time. People learned how to do T9 texts without looking so they could slip their hand into a backpack or pocket during class. There were even ringtones high pitched enough that adults typically didn't hear them. All of this under the threat of phones being confiscated if caught. I'm not defending the use of cell phones in class. But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  > But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them. Arguably those have all been tried, and don't work. I think it's not hard to imagine why algebra may be less captivating than a constant short-form-video dopamine stream for an adolecent.
bdangubic 2y ago
rare as in 1,200+ in the last 4 years… https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings that’s about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything else
- zdragnar 2y ago
  And the vast majority of those are accidental, drive by, and "escalation of dispute" per your link. These are not the kinds of shootings that parents want kids to be texting about, these are run of the mill gang activity. The mass violence shootings that you hear about on TV where anyone and everyone might be a victim are the exception, not the norm.

protocolture 2y ago

My only issue is that its baffling to me that you would deprive kids of a platform that is going to be relatively omnipresent in their lives. Like, a locked down school approved phone that cant load social apps makes sense (And yeah I am more than happy if the tooling is swiss cheese, because we need to inspire new pentesters somehow). But removing them entirely? That seems bonkers.

Aerroon 2y ago
This baffles me as well. A large group of people seem to immediately treat it as a foregone conclusion that smartphone bans are entirely positive. Nobody seems to even question the idea that we shouldn't ban things by default. The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right? Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.
- graemep 2y ago
  We ban lot of things for kids that they have to cope with in adult life. The US even bans alcohol for young adults, and there are few places where someone under 16 can buy it. Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default. IMO we would be better off if adults stopped using it too.
  - protocolture 2y ago
    We do ban lots of things that kids will have to cope with in adult life. But we don't ban harmless tools that kids will need to learn to use in adult life. And you can tell me all about the harms of social media, but social media can be accessed via computer also. Then you will tell me all about how computers are locked down to prevent access to social media at school. Effectively you will go on to describe reasonable controls that schools have decided they simply wont implement in this case. The truth of the matter is technical literacy is in decline, schools have almost completely vacated the space. If teachers are mad at distracted students they can incorporate the distraction into the education (My secondary school did this with classes Excel in for basic financial maths, edutainment games, dedicated computer research lessons for otherwise book subjects) or choose to entirely stunt the kids by removing them. Schools did this same shit to computers, they started by banning them, then incorporating them in lots of meaningful ways. If schools tried to ban laptops at school today we would be up in arms, but lots of "reasonable" people saw it as an easy quick win the last time around. The trick here is to convince schools not to be 10 years behind but to keep up. If that means more funding in you jurisdiction, or higher fees, then do it. I always remember a good friend of mine who was the first in his entire school to write an essay on his Apple II and print it off to hand in to the teacher. He got a zero for "cheating" and swore off computers until he was over 30. I imagine his experience would be familiar to kids caught "cheating" by using their pocket access to all of human knowledge to conduct research.