Pleasant outcome to the school phone ban

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This article was published 30/10/2024 (700 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a world full of disruptions and difficulties, it’s awfully nice when things go according to plan.

When the provincial government announced a provincewide ban on cellphones in classrooms in August this year, there were many reasons to bite one’s nails about the change — for educators and school administrators most of all. How would a generation of students, raised in a world dominated by smartphones and social media, deal with a sudden shift to a world in which they were not allowed to have their devices handy?

This reaction, it turns out, has proven cynical. Credit where it’s due, the kids are doing just fine.

There has been much to learn since the ban — which only allows high school students access to their devices during transition periods between classes, and bars them outright for K-8 students — took effect this school year. But while many assumed the hardest adjustment would be on the students, it turns out the teachers have had to adapt as well. Long used to asking students to, for example, upload their assignments via their own devices, teachers and administrators are now acutely aware of shortcomings in their own supply of devices, and the changes that are necessary to both teach and supply students in this new era.

One nice thing about a new paradigm is that it can show you flaws you didn’t realize were there.

As for the students, buy-in to this new way of learning has gone better than expected. There have been a few creative students who have put their minds to the task of sneaking in phone time, yes — nobody expected 100 per cent of students to get on board right away, so it’s not surprising some of them have found workarounds. But it seems some students are happy for the break; Prairie Spirit School Division IT director Troy Sigvaldason told the Free Press earlier this week that students have told him the forced break from screens has been welcome and made them more engaged.

It’s easy to understand why that might be. Many of the students in elementary, middle and high school now are those who spent formative years learning almost entirely through screens, in the time of COVID-19-era school closures. Devices have been an intrinsic part of both their personal and academic lives, and so it seems fair to say that the disdain many adults have for kids who are “always in front of a screen” is misplaced; you can’t really blame the kids for living in the world they were born into, and using the tools they had at hand.

And now we know that if you simply give them different tools, and different ways of doing things, they’re happy to adapt and get on with things.

There have been some complaints. One student, responding to a survey of Winnipeg School Division students, complained that school-provided devices were subpar compared to their personal one — a fair criticism, as schools should be able to provide usable tools, be they digital or otherwise. Some caregivers said they wanted their children to have access to a device for emergency situations.

These are not invalid points of concern, but they aren’t enough to negate what appear to be the many positives of the ban, which is here to stay.

“There’s no going back,” as Hugh John Macdonald School principal Jennifer Scott told the Free Press.

No going back to the way things were — and for the most part, the kids seem just fine with that.