School System Considers Jamming Students' Phones

An anonymous reader writes "The St. Ansgar, Iowa school system is considering buying cell-phone jamming equipment for up to $5000 if it is deemed legal. The use of the equipment would be suspended in the case of an emergency, but one has to wonder if they would be quick enough to shut it down should an emergency arise. 'A Federal Communications Commission notice issued in 2005 says the sale and use of transmitters that jam cellular or personal communications services is unlawful.'"

Comments

back in my day

[loafula]

we didn't have cell phones. beepers were just starting to appear when i graduated high-school. we never had any problems alerting in the event of an emergency. we had fire alarms, PA system, and ye olde fashioned telephones in every classroom.

Re:back in my day

[Anonymous Coward]

In my day, we didn't have emergencies in school. I graduated before Columbine. Back then if someone made you mad, you just beat the shit out of them instead of shooting up the whole school. I saw stuff like a jock stealing a nerd's backpack in the lunchroom, and then the nerd smacking the jock in the head with a metal chair repeatedly until he was down and taking back the backpack. The lunch monitor didn't even flinch. No one gave such fights a second thought; not teachers, not parents, and not students.

Re:back in my day

[gnick]

Still, this is a simple solution. Kids don't need cell-phones in class. If there's an emergency, the principal can inform the student involved. So, block cell-phones.

However, active transmitters are illegal - And there are valid reasons for that. So use passive blockers. The cost is probably a little higher, but the result is the same. And you're not tangling with the FCC. Our local movie theater does it (although they built it in during construction, lowering the installation price).

Heck, call installing chicken-wire a "make-work" program and you may get a chunk of the stimulus $$.

Re:back in my day

[snowraver1]

I think you are having a flashback of WWF summerslam '88

Re:back in my day

[loafula]

I don't think it's so much a social stigma as it is a distraction from the learning environment.

Re:back in my day

[b4upoo]

We also used suspensions and expulsions to deal with those that broke rules such as not bringing certain items onto school property.
            But these days the kids have turned the table on us. Now dropping out is so common that schools can not regulate the children as the schools are under pressure to keep kids from dropping out.
            In order to turn things around we need to get rid of the G.E.D. and let kids know that if they drop out they will live in poverty and follow that up by demonstrating that we are more than willing to toss kids out of school.
            That may sound cruel but it could stop the current loss of lives and futures that now are consequences of a broken educational system.

Re:back in my day

[QuantumRiff]

You have no idea the growing levitation power of the new, modern, helicopter parent. They would scream if you even thought of proposing that maybe, just maybe, the kids should leave the burning building BEFORE calling them. (So they can immediately schedule a meeting with the principal and teacher about the lack of fireproofing in the school, and how it affects their childs chances of getting into a good college) For once, think of the parents, not the children. If they can't reach/see their children every minute of every day, then obviously, child molesters are trying to kidnap them...

the last few years, I have started feeling very, very sorry for teachers..

Re:back in my day

[Hawthorne01]

It's the texting that's the big issue. My wife teaches middle-school math, and she is constantly interrupting her classes to tell her students to put their not-allowed-on-campus phones away.

30 years ago, it was passing notes in class. Now it's texting. 30 years from now it'll brain-melding in class or something...

Re:back in my day

[Clueless Moron]

So are vocal chords

Aw Christ... a chorus of crazy characters might use a corps of vocal cords to sing a chronicle of chromatic chords, but it's still spelled vocal "cords", not "chords".

Re:back in my day

[WED Fan]

Thank you for telling me what my child needs and where.

Thank you for foisting your ill-behaved little offspring on the rest of the world. If you had taught your children how to operate in a polite society, then society wouldn't be looking at a way to enforce good behaviour.

Re:back in my day

[Ares]

a lot of emergency management agencies are moving up to 800 mhz systems

from the great wiki:

# 806-824 MHz: Public safety and commercial 2-way (formerly TV channels 70-72)
# 824-851 MHz: Cellular A & B franchises, terminal (mobile phone) (formerly TV channels 73-77)
# 851-869 MHz: Public safety and commercial 2-way (formerly TV channels 77-80)
# 869-896 MHz: Cellular A & B franchises, base station (formerly TV channels 80-83)

it'd be very hard to filter out 824-851 and 869-896, at least passively, while still allowing the public safety frequencies to remain in use.

Re:back in my day

[Archangel Michael]

You're right, and you're wrong.

You're right, in that there is NO cure for boring Teachers (Bueller? Anyone?).

However, your wrong if you have ADDITIONAL distractions available. I don't care how "interesting" things are especially if some girl is texting naked pictures of herself to her boyfriend.

On a scale of "interesting", the most entertaining and engaging teacher cannot compete with all sorts of other "interesting" options.

There is NO need for a cell phone in a K-12 classroom. Especially when you consider that every classroom HAS a phone in it! NONE!

Re:back in my day

[Roger W Moore]

I graduated before Columbine.....the nerd smacking the jock in the head with a metal chair repeatedly until he was down....The lunch monitor didn't even flinch.

Lessons learnt: you can get away with just about anything (e.g. beating someone around the head with a metal implement!!) if you think it is justified, if you are going to nick something make sure you leave the victim in no fit state to come after you and you can save money by sacking the "lunch monitors". All excellent preparation for entry into a civilized society.
Makes you wonder how Columbine could possibly have happened doesn't it?

Re:back in my day

[Omestes]

So how did we manage to raise our children safely, much less survive, for the last 100k+ years without them?!

Oh wait, when I was in school (before cellphones), my parents could come pick me up from school just fine. Telling me before the fact really didn't matter, and still doesn't. (I love people who really need to call you and tell you that they are on their way, then call you and tell you that they're there, and then come and knock on your damn door). The rest of your examples are pretty weak proof for the need to have always on access to your children (poor kids!). How often will I need to call my kids in the case of a terrorist attack? Wait... Your chances of being involved in a terrorist attack is less than your chances of being struck by lightening.

The convenience isn't worth the price, especially if we're going to use terrorism as an excuse (yet again).

As for:

"You left your homework home again, I'll meet you after 3rd period to drop it off - last time (right) I'm doing this"

So, your going to disrupt a whole class of 20-30 children for this?

One of my professors in college would drop you a grade-point every time you disrupted the class with a phone call. It was actually a very popular program.

Re:back in my day

[Londovir]

You are partially joking in your response, but you are more correct than, perhaps, you even realize.

I've been a public school teacher at a high school for 4 years now, and to be honest, cell phones are an utter nightmare. The cheating of students using texting to get answers is rampant, well beyond anything that, as teachers, we were never warned about. Students have become masters of texting "under the table", and it has gotten bad enough that I now feel the need to make 12 different versions of a test for the 6 classes I teach a day - versions A and B for each period. I know that if I don't, by the end of 1st period, all of my students in periods 2-7 will have the questions (and answers) by the time I get to them. The "rookie" teachers who haven't learned that realize it awfully quick when the grade distributions go steeply upwards by the end of the day. Even then, with the prevalence of iPhones and Blackberry phones, cheating is becoming even more widespread since students can easily websurf to the answers for test questions. I have to hawk around my room constantly looking for phones under desks. It's amazing.

As a county, we've tried everything to penalize the use of cell phones, to no avail. We've tried detentions (students never serve them), we've tried suspensions ("Oh, a day that I don't have to go to school, great!"), no deterrents worked.

Then we tried getting "tougher". We tried to take the cell phone away from the student until the end of the school day. That lasted about 2 weeks, until we were told we couldn't do that any longer because a parent decided to get a jazzy lawyer and sue the district. They, apparently, were convinced that we were endangering their student by taking away their ability to call for help in an emergency. Rather than fight it out in court (and risk losing, as these things tend to go), the county settled and changed the policy. Now, supposedly, the plan is to confiscate the battery, but let the student keep the phone. Of course, students now carry spare batteries, so it doesn't matter.

We were the school a few years back that had the lockdown that made CNN news, when a deputy sheriff and his police dog were both shot and killed less than 2000 feet from our school. It was a massive manhunt that made national news. We were locked down for about 9 hours, with about (literally) 200 police with assault rifles and body armor, with armored vehicles, and eventually they bussed us out of the school under very heavy armed guard. During that time, the cell phones became a fiasco. Every student with a phone was calling their parents, and every parent was coming to the school to try and get their darling children out, despite the reality that a gunman with 2 automatics who had already killed a cop was anywhere around. The police were stretched thin trying to keep the roadblocks up to keep the idiot parents away. Insanity.

It gets worse then that, of course. I've had cases where I pass back a test at 8am to a 2nd period class, and I get an email from our secretary at 8:30am saying that the students parent called and wants to talk to me about the grade their daughter got on the test. Last year the newest craze was students getting "disposable" cell phones and using them to call in bomb threats to the school. Of course, any time a threat comes in you have to go through the evacuation drill, just in case, and according to our resource officer it can be difficult for them to trace the "disposable" cell phones. Plus, as before, any time some drill does come in, it's only a matter for 15 minutes before a bunch of parents show up ready to check their kids out of school.

I couldn't be happier as a teacher than if they blocked every last cell phone on campus. I don't have a phone in my classroom (very few of us in our high school have one in the room), but we each have intercoms we can use to reach the main office, and we had no communication problems during the dangerous lockdown. I don't need to use a cell phone during the school day, at least not once in the 4 years I've been there.

Re:back in my day

[PPH]

In my day we didn't have screenshots.

You just had to take people's word for things...or risk getting beaten over the head with a chair.

I might be too old...

[anomnomnomymous]

But what happened to good ol' telling them not to use their mobiles, and if they -do- use it, apply punishment?
I obviously didn't RTA, but what a waste of money... (if not the possible consequences)

Re:I might be too old...

[oahazmatt]

But what happened to good ol' telling them not to use their mobiles, and if they -do- use it, apply punishment?

A crapload of lawsuits against the schools happened.

When I was a senior in high school, a student started physically assaulting one of the teachers. The teacher didn't fight back because he had been instructed, as the entire faculty had been, to not do so as the school would face a lawsuit if a teacher injured a student.

I noticed that as I went from Kindergarten to a Senior in High School the teachers seemed to become less aggressive. They no longer bellowed "sit down and do your work" but asked you politely to "stay on task, everyone".

I was glad I got out before things became any more passive-aggressive.

Re:I might be too old...

[knarfling]

BULL! There may be teachers that are like that, but to say "most" is a gross miss-representation.

My father-in-law is a Jr. High School teacher, so I can tell you some of the restraints that are on the teachers.
They are not allowed to discipline students. (I am not talking physical discipline here. Teachers are not to scold a student for bad behaviour. At most they can send them to the principle's office, which means the kids gets out of class that day.)
If a teacher gives a student a bad grade, they are often yelled at by a parent, claiming that if the teacher has it in for the child, sometimes even calling the teacher racist. (That happened to my father-in-law.)
Teachers are not allowed to confiscate knives, cell-phones, distracting toys or video games without being accused of stealing, but make sure each student pays attention.
Teachers are given conflicting instructions on teaching. (leave no child behind, but teach to the highest level. Don't teach just so they pass tests, but you need to cram 1.5 years of test stuff plus the stuff beyond the tests into 9 months.)
Oh, and by the way, we are cutting salary again because we don't have the budget, but we need to attract the best and brightest teachers.
While we are at it, we know that you have been teaching students for 10 years and have some of the highest test scores in the state, but this charter school that has only 3 students per class has a new method of teaching so we want you to start using it in your class of 35.
If the teacher can't keep the class in line, sometimes it is because they are not allowed to, not because they can't be bothered.

With the way teachers are treated these days, I would never recommend a teaching profession to anyone.

Unlawful, probably

[ultraexactzz]

In most places, and correct me if I'm wrong, but no one can impede the function of a cellphone when it is calling emergency services. Hell, a 10-year-old cellphone with no service provider still has to be able to connect to 911 - many cities solicit old phones for use by women in domestic violence shelters as emergency phones for just this reason. If the jamming can be rigged to let 911 calls through, then this might be legal from that standpoint.

Whether the FCC allows such things overall, though, is quite another issue.

In before...

[sakdoctor]

In before completely unrealistic, hypothetical scenario involving an off-work doctor who is out on his unicycle, when someone gets their second cellphone stuck in their throat, and would have been saved if it hadn't been for the phone-jamming equipment in operation at a nearby school.

Jam?

[clone53421]

What kind? Blackberry?

Re:WTF?

[Darkness404]

I think the main problem is really the fact that the school is not designed for the 21st century. Students should be -encouraged- to collaborate because the real world is built on collaboration and research. Memorization ends up being part of it when you research the same thing. Think of programming, even if you use a reference book, eventually you start to memorize it to the point where you hardly need to look in the book. Really, the school system needs reformed, more critical thinking, less multiple choice or single-answer questions, because like it or not that isn't the real world. You aren't locked in a dark room with no internet, no reference materials, no collaboration and being handed a sheet of questions. That isn't how it works. Schools should not be teaching the way they are, teach in a way that allows collaboration because that is how the real world works.

Not so bad

[atomic_bomberman]

When I was in high school, rock music and dancing were illegal. We couldn't even dance at prom. That is, until Kevin Bacon moved to our town.

What if....

[RingDev]

What if instead of jamming phones, the school put up their own cell antena. They could work with the other local providers to tweek the handoff rules such that phones in side the school are significantly more likely to stay on the school's tower.

Once you have all of those phones on the school's tower it would be simple to shut down texting and internet access while still allowing access to 911 and emergency numbers listed in the student's records.

Sure, it'll cost more than $5000 to get up and maintain, but it is much more likely to pass muster.

Personally though, I'm all for the confiscate and return rule. It's cheaper AND it reinforces lessons in personal responsibility.

-Rick

Re:WTF?

[Abcd1234]

Students should be -encouraged- to collaborate because the real world is built on collaboration and research.

Yes, because I'm sure the problem is that students are just *dying* to collaborate over their cell phones, and those nasty teachers are too backwards to understand it. :rollseyes:

Sorry buddy, this is the kind of thing that's being communicated between students during times when they should be working:

"OMG did u c wat ashleys waring 2day???"
"OMG I no wat a hore!"
"LOL!!!"

Re:If it's legal?

[Achromatic1978]

No idea why I'm humoring an AC who thinks that such claims are outrageous, all of these are real, and recent examples:

• Teacher smacks student: so many of these, take your pick
• Teacher duct tapes kids mouth: here, and google for more
• Teacher duct tapes kid to desk: here, and google for more
• Teacher strip searches half a dozen prepubescent girl... the only one with a little hyperbole, a principal who strip searched a 13 yo girl because... "another student said she had motrin" (let's be clear here, motrin is an ibuprofen-based analgesic, nothing more): and google for more

Is that the kind of evidence you're looking for? Are you a teacher in self-righteous denial?

Re:Oh good argumentation!

[DavidTC]

The logical conclusion is that school shootings cause cell phones.