It has been over a month since the 2023-2024 school year started and there are a lot of new rules and policies that have developed since last year for everyone. These new policies  consisted of advocacy changes, late work changes and even a new phone policy. The new phone policy for this year states that there’s no phones allowed in class including advocacy and learning lab. This has been one of the most controversial and talked about changes this school year so far, with students having all different strong options on this new rule, it has been hard for teachers to implement this policy the way it’s intended. 

No phones are nothing new to Frederick High School. Not being on phones in class has been a rule for many years before this, just never put into affect the way teachers are this year. I’ve interviewed a few students at our school to get their options on it and here’s what they had to say about this new phone policy. I asked many people about their stance on the phone policy. “I think the cell phone policy is effective but when a teacher sees the phone multiple times and they keep on talking about it. Just let it go at that point,  Hurry up and just send the phone down to the office so we can move past it,” said a sophomore who wished to remain anonymous. Then after that option I decided to ask another student to see if more students felt this way too. “I think some of the restrictions are wack, for example, if there’s an emergency you can’t text your parents during class because of the rules, I’ve seen multiple teachers say it doesn’t matter if your mom is texting you get off the phone,” said another sophomore who wished to remain anonymous.

Everybody in this school has heard the students opinion on this topic but I really wanted to get a teachers perspective on this subject so I decided to ask one of the English teachers at Frederick High, Mrs. Scott, how she feels about this rule and this is what she said: “I think the cell phone policy is a way for teachers to better help their students for their own good but some students don’t realize that.”

This rule has and will be very hard on students, and even can be hard for teachers if they can’t implement it with students correctly. The end goal of this rule for teachers is to bring work time back into the classrooms.