Although the UW study recommends a two-tiered policy that allows phone use in high school, Parent Check on Tech believes this gives too much weight to the student survey conclusion that high schoolers like having their phones.

The research actually supports a stricter, away-all-day policy for all students, and indicates that a stricter policy would increase equity in enforcement and help teachers teach and students learn. Quotes from the study:

"MMSD’s disciplinary data aligns with national data, showing that discipline disproportionately affects students of color and low-income students. The choice of device policy has direct implications for these disparities. Interviewed school staff believed that policies that keep devices on students — and therefore depend on frequent teacher-initiated discipline to enforce — are most likely to reproduce existing inequities, since every enforcement interaction is an opportunity for implicit bias."

"East teachers also reported concerns that a policy like Memorial’s, which involves a BRT member coming to class and handing out punishments such as ISS, would negatively impact the most vulnerable students and further disrupt class. Interviewees expressed that policies removing devices from the classroom entirely, through inaccessible storage, would reduce the number of enforcement interactions and therefore limit disparate discipline."

"Almost all those interviewed favored either all-day storage or a full ban, where enforcement is concentrated at the start of the day, to reduce teacher fatigue and student confrontation. Teachers asserted that the time lost to collecting devices at entry is less than the instructional time and energy currently consumed by in-class enforcement. Several expressed concern that the district’s staff survey described only a formalized status quo, and that a policy too close to current practices would not produce meaningful change. Further, all schools reported that they did not want a policy less strict than their current one."

The proposed policy is nearly identical to the current policy at West High School that is not working.

Parents and teachers are desperate for real change.