Southern Delaware high schools craft their own phone policies

With schools vary in their cultures and teaching approaches, schools in southern Delaware have approached phone policies differently particularly at the high school level where students are more mature and responsible for their decisions.

Brandywine High School and the Smyrna School District are among the latest schools to implement cell phone policies for the upcoming school year separate from the legislative pilot project.

At Sussex Central High School, there is no school-wide policy on phones, but a few classrooms have implemented their own rules.

“The teachers at my school, we have the autonomy to create our own cell phone policies,” said Jeff Gartman, who teaches media and technology. “The administration gives us that freedom to make our own decisions and they trust us to do what’s best for our classroom.”

A number of teachers at Sussex Central use phones as a tool to foster discussions or facilitate research among students. Yet, after 20 years of teaching, Gartman recognized the devices can also pose a distraction that needs to be addressed in his classroom.

“It piles up to lost time, lost engagement and getting kids being less productive and the whole environment being less effective,” he said. “Personally, I have been struggling with this for years, trying different ways of managing it and I was just not successful with really fighting off the distraction that the phones are to students when they have them in their possession.”

What works for him and other teachers in his building is eliminating cell phone access, a policy he started last spring. This decision prompted him to purchase a hanging storage organizer with little pouches. Each pouch is assigned to a student with their name for every period throughout the day.

“Students come into my room and there’s a pouch hanging on the wall with a bunch of individual pouches. They’ve got their name on one of them. They come in, they put the phone in there,” he described. “I’ve even got it rigged up so they can charge their phone while they are in class, about two minutes before the bell rings at the end of class I allow them to come get it.”

After two months of implementing the policy, despite initial concerns, he now feels accomplished and pleased with the positive feedback from parents and students. He has noticed a noticeable improvement in his students and the overall classroom environment.

“For the most part taking the distraction away just added to the whole environment and kids were more productive, less distracted, and got more done,” said Gartman.

State Sen. Paradee says the phone pouches test pilot may not be ready in time for this school year since the state Department of Education is just drafting its regulation. He says the goal is to have the funds available for schools by the middle of the school year.

He encourages parents, guardians and caregivers to give the test pilot a chance. “My message to all the parents, grandparents, caregivers: hang in there, give it a shot and we’ll work through this.”