Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006 • Janesville Board debates allowing cellphones in school

Publisher’s note: This story originally appeared in the Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006, edition of the Lassen County Times.

At its Aug. 14 meeting, the Janesville Union School District Board of Trustees debated whether it’s necessary to ban cellphones from the school. The school handbook currently lists cellphones as inappropriate for school use, it does not ban them outright.

“We don’t want to have cellphones ringing in class, going off, kids text-messaging each other during a test, all those kinds of things,” said school principal Gary McIntire. “But we have to balance that out with, we have working parents, and Tom goes home after school and Mom wants to make sure he made it home. It’s that transportation of the thing — getting it home — that’s been the complication in this policy. I personally am in favor of parents being able to reach their children.”

Not everyone agreed.

“Cellphones are wonderful,” said Shannon Miller, “but what did we do years ago when we didn’t have them? They’re not needed. Don’t bring them. If they need to get ahold of their kids, call the school. I know parents will not agree because they like that option, but they’re not needed in a school. We’ve done it for years in a school trying to get ahold of our kids without them. Let it go — this is elementary.”

One suggestion put forth by eighth-grade instructor Rick Giannotti was to develop a contract between the school and the parents if a student needs to bring a cell phone to school.

“If the child’s going to have the phone at school, it would be nice to know. It would be nice for the parent to fill out a form that says my child is going to bring this and on the form there’s a statement that says it can be used in this case or this case but cannot be used in these instances,” Giannotti said. “Which is more work for us, but it might eliminate some of this ‘what if’ and ‘what if not’ kind of stuff if we know every kid that has one on campus.”

“If you leave a little window, that’s where it seems to be a problem,” Miller said.

Inappropriate for school use
Page seven of Janesville School’s Wildcat Handbook lists many items as inappropriate for school use, including  “cellphones, pagers, cameras, video recorders, video games, tape recorders, CD players, tape players, toys, party gags, balloons, hard baseballs, non-approved books or magazines, glass containers, yo-yos, trading cards, expensive jewelry, metal baseball bats and glass bottles.”

While these items aren’t banned outright, many are considered too distracting, some are considered too dangerous and others too expensive for the school to have to take responsibility if they get lost.

A few of them are considered appropriate under certain circumstances. For example, some of the bus drivers see students having CD players as a benefit since they somewhat prevent kids from goofing off during the drive.

When asked how much time he’s spent dealing with the items listed on the page, Giannotti said, “I’ll bet you I’ve got 20 to 30 hours into that stuff — just me last year. Because one kid will loan it to someone else or give them a game then it doesn’t get returned and it becomes my responsibility — the teacher’s — to get it back to them.

“But it’s something we can do. We can handle this. It’s just about finding wording in there that gives us the ability to say, ‘If you don’t abuse the privilege you get to keep doing it.’”