Texas Educators Praise New School Cellphone Ban
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Texas educators praise a new law banning cellphones in schools, but commenters question its effectiveness and enforcement, highlighting the gap between policy and reality.
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If I would have thought about it for 30 seconds, I would have realized that it was ALREADY against school rules for students to have cell phones. What extra enforcement is this law going to add? Did they allocate another 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars a year PER SCHOOL to hire extra security staff to pat down/strip search/cavity search a few thousand students every day?
They have already cut class time to 40 minutes--am I supposed to spend an extra 15 minutes per class patting down students, inspecting bags, etc?
This is a classic example of legislation which is passed just to make people feel like their government is actually doing something. But you can pass whatever law you want--that doesn't mean anybody is going to follow it.
How familiar are you with Texas?
Texas does not pass much of anything that could be grouped with "just to make people feel like their government is actually doing something". They don't need that. They have been doing Trump style governing since before Trump. They do things that keep them in office and throw bones to their base that allow their voters to bask in the glow of a short lived "owning the libs" high. Which gets votes more than anything policy related; see Ken Paxton popularity for the Senate seat. Especially when it comes to schools, they pass things like displaying of donated "In God we Trust" posters, The Ten Commandments in classrooms and allowing the state curriculum to get hijacked by the christian bible. Not things restricting non-religion based freedoms. That doesn't fly here.
The fact this was passed with bi-partisanship after New York and CA being in the news for similar says a lot to this being something people actually wanted.
---[Added from the article]
> Did they allocate another 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars a year PER SCHOOL to hire extra security staff to pat down/strip search/cavity search a few thousand students every day?
>> Each day, students are filtered through a few entrances where their devices are locked inside the pouch with a magnetic key. They keep the pouch on them until it gets unlocked once the day’s classes are over. The district, which enrolls more than 14,000 students at 20 schools, spent about $120,000 implementing the measure, Khun said. He added that much of that cost was covered by security grants offered by the state.
Texas has a lot of money.
How much time have you spent teaching high school?
// here their devices are locked inside the pouch with a magnetic key. //
Soo....what do they do if the kid just says, "I don't have a cell phone?" Which I guarantee 90% of them do. I'll tell you what they do--nothing. You can pass laws, you can spend money, but unless there is actual *enforcement* it's just kabuki.
// spent about $120,000 implementing the measure //
sigh Texas is hiring uncertified instructors to be teachers. Texas is increasing class sizes. There are schools operating without a library. Budgets are being cut in real terms. And they are cutting bus routes, so some students have no reliable way to get to school.
But yet, this school just had to pay $120k--and they bought absolutely no *enforcement*.
// Texas does not pass much of anything that could be grouped with "just to make people feel like their government is actually doing something". //
Sorry man, you've just been scammed.
Sorry friend, this is not the midwest. It’s Texas. The state not passing laws that are actually useful to regular people is doing the very something their voters wanted. Its the local elections between the big ones that do things here. Your take was an interesting and fun read though
> How much time have you spent teaching high school?
More time than you took reading the article, otherwise you wouldn’t have wasted the cycles posting this reply full of nonsense assumptions and questions that the article would have straighten out for ya
Sorry, I couldn't parse that, can you rephrase?