“Basically, anytime when you’re not in the classrooms, the bathroom, or the locker room, you can use your phone,” said Vice Principal Dan Kimzey about the new policy.
The policy at the beginning of the year allowed for cell phone use only before and after school and in the lobby during lunch.
Kimzey explained that the original policy was created because the administration wanted to limit things like cheating, the distraction of texting in the classroom, and the inappropriate use of picture capabilities in the locker room.
Kimzey said that with the old policy, “The kids were just in such dire need of being connected to each other that they were violating the policy all the time.” He had 130 policy violations first semester. Kimzey said that the school’s options were “to come up with something more workable that allowed students to use them in an appropriate way while limiting the inappropriateness as much as possible or to just look at a total ban.”
He explained that the administrators spoke to other schools that had a complete ban, but those schools were still dealing with five to six phones every week.
To come up with the new policy, Kimzey said that he and PHS principal, Rick Rafter, talked to other schools about their cell-phone policies. They also got a list of students who had violated the previous policy and sat down with some of them to brainstorm a possible solution and brought the ideas to the staff.
The Polson School District policies were under review by the school board at the time, and Kimzey said, “That was one of our really big pushes because we said that we really needed to look at the cell-phone policy because we were struggling at the high school on how to manage the technology.”
Kimzey said that the new cell-phone policy “will have its third reading next month and will be approved. The policy is written loosely enough so that if this just fails and we have all sorts of problems, then our last recourse, I think the only thing we haven’t tried, would be a complete and total ban. That would be misery for students and misery for teachers so I hope we don’t have to go that way.
“Therefore, our focus and our efforts are trying to work with the classroom teachers and to work with the students to show some responsibility. With our new policy, there’s no excuse for kids having to dig through their backpacks every five minutes for their phone and look at a text message when as soon as the class is over they can walk out into the hallways, check their messages, and go to their next class.”
Kimzey said, “I really wanted to get out of the cell-phone-confiscation business. It was a miserable part of my job all first semester because I’m holding onto students’ personal property for extended periods of time... . It was a growing frustration.”
As to how the new policy has been going, Kimzey said, “So far, I think it’s working pretty well.” In the second week of the new policy, Kimzey has had a total of five violations, whereas last semester, he was averaging four or five confiscations a week.
Senior Michael Young has been working with the administration for alternative policies ever since a complete cell-phone ban was suggested and said, “I think that the policy that they’ve come up with is probably the best one or the closest to the best one that they could have. It gives to students by allowing them to use cell phones out of class time. Through the greater punishments, it shows that the administration is serious about the cell-phone policy.”
Malika Erickson is a senior at Polson High School and co-editor of the Salishian, the student newspaper.
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