This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is how the kids know they are not in an institution of learning, but a prison for the crime of being juvenile.
What we're also not going to hear is how often devices are misplaced, confiscated without return or just dissappear like socks in a dryer.
I don't know if I am supposed to be angry about this or not. Someone tell me if I'm supposed to be angry!
Schools are scared to death of kids recording their staff being stupid, and each other. Legal liability/parental outrage. They block both phones and smart watches. If it were just a usage problem, they could have done what we always do and only take things away when they're an issue.
Since the advent of phones, this hasn't been a real problem.
My son's school collects them at the classroom door if they have them out, or ignores it if they're in their bag as long as they don't make noise. - free
Kansas, who is already horrible at maintaining educational budgets to a self-destructive degree wants to spend 150k of (likely unwilling) taxpayer money to provide fancy lockers for phones that could be solved by leave it in your bag and off, if we find it on or it makes noise, you get detention.
It's a stupid waste or resources and time.
if 0 is the Byrds Turn Turn Turn and 10 is RaTM bulls on parade, maybe go 6 or 7
It's likely also plain corruption, just lawmakers creating ways for their friends to siphon money from government budgets with useless gadgets like this.
Seems like a straightforward solution to a simple problem. Pretty direct correlation with kids having access to smartphones vs declining grades and attention spans.
In schools that have started simply not allowing phones in class, grades have improved. This seems like the next logical step. Its basically just returning to pre-smartphone days. Schools used to confiscate phones if you had them out at all during school hours.
People will disagree with simple solutions, but those are often the ones that works. Phones cause problems, get rid of phones. Simple and direct.
Whoa whoa whoa now. Whoa. That is an entirely too reasonable take. No conspiracy, no blaming capitalism or someone trying to scam and grift. Just a reasonable take. Hmmph, I am disappoint. I have nothing to be angry about now. Hmmph!
Decoy phone lol
Don't say that. Then they'll buy another safe for the decoy phones.
Bring two phones. Problem solved.
The problem of being distracted in class can be solved by having two phones? Weird!
Freedom or fascism.
What do you mean to say? It's not clear to me.
I'm seeing alot of comments about how this will or won't work for how much the price is, but this made me think of something else.
Don't we give kids chromebooks/devices anyway. I assume the point of these lockers is to force kids to pay attention, but chromebooks are waaaaaay worst than any phone a parent gave them.
You can threaten a kid to take their phone away, but you can almost argue you can't take the chromebook away because that's where all their assignments, tasks, books, notes, etc are all stored. And from my experience, people were always goofing off on other sites or playing games. Unless the school is able to monitor and lock down those chromebooks (which if we're being honest, have the bare minimum of parental controls), then this is just throwing money at a fire instead of, I dunno, paying teachers better to actually help kids learn instead of moderating their tiktok addictions
There are webfilters for all edu devices... Except Windows 11 SE and that's because the hardware can't even run the OS.
But fr... At least Chromebooks are easy to lock down if gadmin and 3rd party filters are set up.
Fantastic news, I’m glad they’re proactively seeking solutions
They could just leave them at home. I mean that worked just fine literally forever until these last two generations.
But, since both parents and kids are now addicted to the damn things, no one can imagine not having one in their hand for more than five minutes.
That requires an honesty system and kids aren’t honest
And cooperative parents
It is long past time cell phones started to be regulated in schools.
BUT...
...what gets me is the money angle here. Can anyone out there help me understand why a temp-use cell phone locker is $180,000? To me, this just screams government malfeasance, and I'd bet someone involved in the passage of this bill either owns a company or took a bribe from the company that wants to sell $180,000 cell phone lockers that people are forced to buy.
Followed some links and did some googling. The school district in question is USD-261 in Haysville, Kansas. The high school should have about 1800 students, so they would need 67 of these cell phone lockers. The price for 6+ is $1510, but let's knock another $110 off since they're buying 11 times that many, so $1400. That's $93,800, for just the high school, and that's before we talk about where the hell you're going to put 67 of those things, and who you're going to pay to install them and do any necessary renovations to accommodate them.
