Silent Mode

Reporter's Insight

Published in Wingspan Vol. 12 Issue 1

At the end of the 2023-2024 school year, our school board passed a new policy requiring students to place their phones in a designated area, starting the next school year. That summer all the editors and I agreed we’d need to do a story about that policy when we got back to school. I ended up writing the sidebar for the story. It focused on how the policy came to be and the behind-the-scenes work that went into it. Through this sidebar, I wanted to inform students at our school that the policy wasn’t just created to jump on a trend of cell phone policies across the nation. Instead, it was a thought-out plan that went through multiple groups of people and multiple stages of revision. I hoped that writing this may have caused students to rethink or affirm their belief in the administration's efforts to prevent distractions in the classroom. Overall, this ended up being more focused on admin and their efforts rather than the policy which was covered in the main story.

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PHOTO BY: GLENNIS WOOSLEY

“At the start of every class period, students will silence their cell phones and place them in a designated area where they will remain until the end of class, including STAR,”

2024-2025 Nixa High School Student/Family Handbook said.

New phone policy at NHS went through multiple reviews before it was passed

Nixa High School’s new cell phone policy reflects the school’s approach to minimizing distractions in the classroom.
“Teachers were starting to complain about it and wanted to do something,” Dr. David Kelly, principal of NHS, said. “That’s what started the conversation of, ‘How can we go about doing this?’”
With more requests from teachers, the topic of a policy change was discussed in a Guiding Coalition meeting. The Guiding Coalition is a group of NHS teacher leaders who come together —every three weeks— to figure out how to improve the school.
“[The] Guiding Coalition had a conversation about what we would like the policy to look like,” Kelly said. “We looked at several different handbooks from schools… and we found Ladue High School and we liked their policy.”
Administrators presented the idea of a phone policy to a couple students who agreed that the change may be beneficial for the student body. The policy was then written into the high school handbook for 2024-2025.
Last May, the school board did their first read through of the handbook which included the new cell phone policy.
“The idea was brought to the board by the administrators of the high school as part of the student handbook,” Joshua Roberts, president of the school board said. “The removal of cell phones from the students’ immediate possession during class time serves the goal of reinforcing attention to learning while simultaneously reducing the negative outside influences.”
In June, the policy was officially passed.
“At this point, if things continue the way they are, then I don’t foresee any major changes to [the policy],” Kelly said.