We Need Adults in the Room
In our home there is constant chatter, by me, about the state of public education and most recently, the need to get phones out of schools. Therefore, I was thrilled when my teenage son came home the other day and said, “You’re right, it would be better if we didn’t have phones in school.” I excitedly told him how he could start a student initiative and after a lengthy momologue about how he could accomplish this, he said a definitive no thank you.
And honestly, it's not his responsibility, its ours. But until we start acting like the adults in the room and get phones out of schools, we are shirking that responsibility. When smartphones came on the scene around 2012, test scores began to fall and loneliness in school began to rise. This happened all over the world, at the same time. Smartphones brought more classroom conflicts, teacher burnout, cyberbullying, reduced self-confidence, and a mental health crisis. A kid whose phone is buzzing with alerts from texts and social media during class is a kid who is not paying attention in class. A kid who needs to keep up with the micro dramas that emerge online each day is a kid who will not be talking with friends between classes, or at lunch. Our public schools should be teaching our kids how to live in community with each other - something we need to be learning more than ever right now - and constant smartphone use not only erodes their developing brains, but the communities created in public schools that are so valuable to this state.
Montana’s Constitution requires a system of education that “develops the full educational potential of each person.” Although our legislature has failed to follow Montana law by using our property tax dollars to give tax breaks to corporations instead of investing in our schools, we have the power right now to make a giant impact for our kids and their teachers. And if we don’t do anything and continue to complain on the sidelines about phones in schools, the attendance policy, the ridiculousness of pay-to-play sports, and all of the other circumstances we have created that are doing our kids harm, we are guilty of the circumstances we find ourselves in because what we don’t do can also be a destructive force. It already has been.
Montana’s schools are the foundation of our communities so unless we take back those communities for our kids and show up as adults who want our kids to thrive, our kids and our communities will continue to suffer
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