My kids’ high school required kids to have a phone. They strongly encouraged the kids use the calendar to track assignments, they used the camera for capturing homework instructions from a white board, they sometimes made movies for class assignments, and they had some kind of Twitter-like app for the teachers to broadcast to the kids and the kids to contact teachers (this didn’t seem to be used often). They also used the browser a lot for looking stuff up.

When I went to the fall parent-teacher orientation night and they explained all this, it didn’t sound like phone use was a huge problem, but maybe they just didn’t want to talk about the problems. I did like that they had structure around phone use that included appropriate and inappropriate uses of the phone.

I totally get banning phones with young kids, but high schoolers should be treated more like adults as they progress through the grades. Some of the kids were entering the workforce or joining the military after their senior year. They should be ready for that.