NAHANT — Superintendent of Schools Robert Liebow announced an upcoming requirement that the district adopt a new, stricter cell phone and personal device policy based on state legislation and guidance from the attorney general at Tuesday night’s School Committee meeting.
Liebow said he anticipates having a drafted policy at the next meeting in August.
The new policy, which Liebow said can have “slight tweaks,” outlines that personal devices, including cell phones, are not to be used during the school day — including hallways, lunch, and recess — not just during class.
He said taking cell phones away from students raises concerns regarding locating students in the event of an emergency, drawing on his experiences with ALICE training in another district, where students were instructed to evacuate the school to a secondary location.
ALICE, which is an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate, training, “prepares people to survive the unimaginable,” according to its website.
He described how locating students might be difficult without technology in an emergency situation where students may be hiding in spaces within the school building or off‑site in a designated reunification area.
“I understand the overuse of technology, but the worst case scenario, if you’re a parent and your sixth-grader is somewhere outside of this building, I would imagine people would be interested in where that is, and when that child is located, and where they’re maybe hiding and scared, and they can’t communicate on their phone, and don’t know who’s safe to talk to, who’s not safe to talk to,” Liebow said.
He added, “There is a grant from the state, supposedly providing money for locked storage.”
He added that in a larger school, “You obviously take a cell phone from a kid. You’d better have some explanation for why you can’t return that cell phone to that kid.”
Liebow said he has seen an area in classes with numbered pockets that students put their cell phones in at the start of class.
However, with this method, students have their phones “in the hallway; you’ve got it at lunch; you’ve got it at recess, and they’re saying that’s not a good thing,” he said.
