by Zander Hatzigeorgalis

Baltimore City Public Schools began enforcing a new policy this school year where mobile phones are banned from being used in schools from bell to bell during the school day. The ban is being enforced in every public school in Baltimore City and is part of a growing trend that is spreading to many school districts across the United States.

Many teachers are against this policy and a lot of students are as well. Many students will get sneakier with using their phones, but their phones will be taken away if they are caught using them.

This phone policy has gotten out of hand. Let’s say if I had an accident in my pants and needed to text my father to tell ask him to bring me a new pair. An administrator would take my phone away from me. No matter how many times I tell them why I need to use it, they do NOT care.

Phones are not even allowed during lunch. As someone who cannot handle loud noises, I need headphones to help me in noisy environments like the cafeteria. Sometimes I feel too mentally drained to even communicate with other students. If I were to text my father about something, I would need to go into the bathroom stall, which I hate, since bathrooms aren’t always the cleanest.

I am a student who struggles with school, not because of my phone or headphones, but because it’s hard to focus in some classes due to how poorly the teachers teach me and how boring the classes are. I personally think that the students who struggle like I do should have music playing in their headphones during individual work time or should be allowed to just glance at their phone to look at the time without their phones being taken by the administrators.

I feel like people focus on the wrong thing rather than the actual bad stuff out in the world like students taking their own lives, school shootings, our rights being stripped away, and so much more, and yet they’re worried about phones being a “distraction”? I really think this is so damn unfair. I abhor everything about the phone policy and I abhor how people focus on phones rather than on traumatizing things that cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There are other distracting things out there–for example, there is this one student in my class who can never shut up.

Phones aren’t the problem. The School Board should end the ban on cell phones and start focusing on the issues that really matter.