At least one Kansas district is projecting $150,000 to $180,000 just to equip secondary students with individual phone lockers, according to the Wichita Eagle. The state provided zero dedicated funding. Every dollar comes from local budgets.
Districts choosing fabric locking pouches — think Yondr, the magnetic-lock system concert venues use to keep audiences present — face an estimated $30 per unit. Statewide, the Kansas Division of the Budget put that figure at roughly $13.4 million if every student received one, according to the Lawrence KS Times. Lockers require a steeper upfront investment. Neither option came with a state check attached.
Legislators passed the policy. The price tag was someone else’s problem.
It is long past time cell phones started to be regulated in schools. (And nationwide, but that’ll never happen.)
BUT…
…what gets me is the money angle here. Can anyone out there help me understand why a temp-use cell phone locker is $180,000? To me, this just screams government malfeasance, and I’d bet someone involved in the passage of this bill either owns a company or took a bribe from the company that wants to sell $180,000 cell phone lockers that people are forced to buy.
100% behind phone lockers, but, I do agree the price seems too high for this specific implementation. Looks like those hold ~250 phones each and I’m going to guess should cost $500-$1,000 per locker. A school should only be spending $5k-50k on these lockers.
Right?
$180,000 is absolutely insane. You could literally just get a lockable file cabinet from the 80’s or something and put each phone in its own file folder a few hundred.
It’s for the entire district, and the costs don’t seem that high to me.
14000 slots for students means it’s $12.86 per student over (typically) 20 years…
$0.64 per student per year seems reasonable.
This isn’t for one school, this is for the entire school district. Kansas City SD has 14,000 students across 33 schools. You also have to take into account paying for installation and shipping of 60 of those lockers.
All government agencies get gouged. It’s absurd.
Can anyone out there help me understand why a temp-use cell phone locker is $180,000?
Corruption.
It’s for the entire district, and the costs don’t seem that high to me.
14000 slots for students means it’s $12.86 per student over (typically) 20 years…
$0.64 per student per year seems reasonable.
They could just leave them at home. I mean that worked just fine literally forever until these last two generations.
But, since both parents and kids are now addicted to the damn things, no one can imagine not having one in their hand for more than five minutes.
When your phone is your GPS and radio, no. I was in band, and some days we wouldn’t leave school afterwards because we’d be going to a game across the state. After the game, my mom would want to know where I was, which was usually Waffle House with a dozen others.
I mean I’ve seen a lot more money wasted on much dumber shit.
Kids aren’t going to learn if they’ve got handheld social media internet gaming consoles with them in school. I wouldn’t have. They’re not going to willingly put them away for hours every day. I wouldn’t have. So…lock the fuckers up. These kids need to be educated so I’m not being taken care of by drooling Idiocracy background actors when I’m in end-of-life care. There’s way too much stupid going around already.
To be clear, 180k is too much. I’m just saying I agree with locking the goddamn things up.
“If you take your phone out you get detention.” I don’t see why this doesn’t work anymore. Do parents have no control over their kids anymore? You get detention twice, 3rd time suspended, suspended twice 3rd time expelled. If I got suspended from school for taking my phone out my parents would have simply taken away the phone.
I don’t see why this doesn’t work anymore. Do parents have no control over their kids anymore?
I think you just answered your own question.
Clearly we’ve reached the stage of physically taking and locking their phones up during school hours because verbal threats weren’t working. If parents had control of what their kids were doing when not in close proximity to them, this wouldn’t be happening.
Lot of dumb adults out there these days. I think a lot of parents would be on the “but I need to contact them in case of emergencies” and “you’re threatening my child’s rights” boat if they just floated the idea of suspension for phone use. So now we’re at the physically confiscate them upon entering like contraband stage.
I need to contact them in case of an emergency doesn’t mean the phone is out. Also the only emergency that matters is if the kid is in danger and needs to call someone. If Dad falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck you either A, go pick the kid up from school or B tell him when he gets out of school. The kid isn’t a paramedic.
Also kids don’t have rights at school. That’s why they have the ability to search all their lockers, backpacks, and vehicles without a warrant.
There is no law that says you have a right to have your phone in your hand, or it would be illegal to seperate us from them to go through metal detectors and such at airports, courts, etc
So what do you do if the kid doesn’t lock up their phone at the start of the day and has it in class?
Back in my day you got stuck in detention or pulled from extra curriculars
Then do that if they pull their phone out during class.
“Do parents have no control over their kids?”
Almost never had. Control is an illusion.
Telling them they’re being controlled encourages innovations…so it’s kind of a fucked ouroboros
Kids have no hope these days. Who gives a shit if you get detention? It won’t change your future.
Getting expelled from a school most definitely should effect your future. Alternative schools have never been known to be fun. They also don’t usually have buses that come near you, so parents are going to hate having to drive you there, and if they aren’t going you wind up in a situation where the kid gets taken by child protective services, and that’s not a system that has great futures for kids either.
You still can work in an amazon warehouse with or without school, same like most basic entry jobs. When kids realise the market is dead and no amount of education will provide a career they will stop caring.
Caring about future wasn’t that popular among kids anyway, but when everyone kinda accepts that the future should be sacrificed on an altar of a line going up, it’s even harder to care. We’re going to burn last available resources and warm planet until we can’t grow crops anymore, so we can generate bad videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Who the fuck cares about long division or mitochondria when the most popular occupation in 2050 is projected to be “water refugee”.
Sure, it’s a doom scenario, it’s not guaranteed, we can somehow persevere, humanity always does. And even in the doom scenario It’s not impossible that we’ll conserve the civilization in some form.
What we have lost forever is the trust of our kids, that ship has sailed. When Greta Thunberg asked us not to destroy the planet, the collective response was mockery, anger, and pedo threats. There is a generational disdain bigger than it was for boomers.
I grew up with no portable electronics available at all, we also didn’t learn shit. If your topic is shit and your presentation is boring, kids would find how to ignore you. If it’s interesting, they will listen to you no matter how many smartphones they have. It’s hard, that’s for sure, but this infantilising bullshit makes it harder, not easier. You have to treat the kids like people, that’s the only way. Also you need to recognise that they aren’t adults, so you can’t expect them have hours of uninterrupted attention, smartphones or not.
I don’t know if I am supposed to be angry about this or not. Someone tell me if I’m supposed to be angry!
Seems like a straightforward solution to a simple problem. Pretty direct correlation with kids having access to smartphones vs declining grades and attention spans.
In schools that have started simply not allowing phones in class, grades have improved. This seems like the next logical step. Its basically just returning to pre-smartphone days. Schools used to confiscate phones if you had them out at all during school hours.
People will disagree with simple solutions, but those are often the ones that works. Phones cause problems, get rid of phones. Simple and direct.
Whoa whoa whoa now. Whoa. That is an entirely too reasonable take. No conspiracy, no blaming capitalism or someone trying to scam and grift. Just a reasonable take. Hmmph, I am disappoint. I have nothing to be angry about now. Hmmph!
Are there any studies that link phone use inside schools to those issues? Because I can easily believe that declining grades could be attributed towards the use of tablets and laptops being used in classrooms as well which many schools are encouraging or increasing the use of.
As for attention spans I would believe it’s for the use of phones/tablets/electronics from a young age rather than the use of them inside of a school itself.
Internet rage confusion :D
How does this work, are all students required to put a phone in the locker? What about kids who can’t afford a phone?
And what about kids who get a second phone to put in the locker so they can keep their main phone?
Suddenly all the kids have old flip phones to deposit into the Phone locker.
What about kids who can’t afford a phone?
No phone = Nothing to deposit
And what about kids who get a second phone to put in the locker so they can keep their main phone?
Get rekt. Rules for the poor.
OK, then what about the kids who only have 1 phone but claim to have none?
Confiscation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sooooo exactly what happened two decades ago with phones and gameboys? This is so stupid. I got my phone confiscated a few times in high school and had to pay the school $15 or wait 15 days to get it back. Why is this not an option anymore?
Because parents are lunatics and administration is spineless.
Absolutely, yes.
Had my phone rooted and it suddenly crashed and rebooted mid-class blasting Titanium by David Guetta at full volume for it’s boot sequence.
I could get it back after the school day but I am still not over it >:(But yeah, just confiscate it and get it back after school is done.
Only if they get caught. Seems like a lot of money for a flawed system.
Get rekt. Rules for the poor.
Sorry teachers there’s just no room in the budget for raises. Oh and we’re adding 10 more students to all of your classes too.
Bring two phones. Problem solved.
The problem of being distracted in class can be solved by having two phones? Weird!
Freedom or fascism.
What do you mean to say? It’s not clear to me.
I’m of two minds on this.
It doesnt look like returning the devices has to be immediate or convenient. Heres my proposed plan:
Ban devices entirely. Any item discovered gets confiscated, labeled, and placed in a bin in the office (achieving the “secure” location requirement of the bill.) Students are permitted to label their item. Items are available for pickup weekly at the end of a district-wide midday “value of education” parental education session.
Labelmaker: ~$200/school
Labels: $0.01/item
2 hrs labor weekly: 38×2×$50=$3800/district/year
Value of inconveniencing parents enough to care: priceless.
Banning phones doesn’t work.
Source: my high school
Banning sexual assault, bulling, rape and pedophilia doesn’t work either. Source: my secondary school.
Decoy phone lol
Don’t say that. Then they’ll buy another safe for the decoy phones.
The dumb thing about all this is, I was able to manage keeping my phone away just fine through high school. Hell, even kept it in my sock at one point so I’d know if I was getting a call (emergency situation) but it was still away and unused for the school day.
Why not use existing lockers?
That’s what my son’s school does.
We’ve had a mobile phones ban for students in the Netherlands for a few years now. Our kids have been scared away from social media by my wife’s ingestion of fear-based mainstream news and by my anticapitalist ranting, so it doesn’t really impact them. 🙈
Good on you for protecting them from social media. My 12 year old son has no access to any social media. I got parental control everywhere. Google’s family link even has this “school time” function where it minimizes distractions. I honestly wouldn’t even mind if schools said “no phones in class”.
We don’t use any parental controls. Our kids have always been very trustworthy. I disabled all Google parental spying and blocking for my son as soon as the age limitations would allow it. (My stepdaughter was under the thumb of her father’s monitoring for a long time. She had to face his wrath when she turned off location sharing with him on her iPhone… her second year of college.)
We had to brow-beat my son into getting a WhatsApp account so he could chat with his classmates (his actual friends use Signal, but WhatsApp is what group chats mostly use in Holland). 😅
Did they really need to get each phone its own locker?
You’re suggesting every student out their phone in a bag, and use the honor system when taking it out?
I’m seeing alot of comments about how this will or won’t work for how much the price is, but this made me think of something else.
Don’t we give kids chromebooks/devices anyway. I assume the point of these lockers is to force kids to pay attention, but chromebooks are waaaaaay worst than any phone a parent gave them.
You can threaten a kid to take their phone away, but you can almost argue you can’t take the chromebook away because that’s where all their assignments, tasks, books, notes, etc are all stored. And from my experience, people were always goofing off on other sites or playing games. Unless the school is able to monitor and lock down those chromebooks (which if we’re being honest, have the bare minimum of parental controls), then this is just throwing money at a fire instead of, I dunno, paying teachers better to actually help kids learn instead of moderating their tiktok addictions
There are webfilters for all edu devices… Except Windows 11 SE and that’s because the hardware can’t even run the OS.
But fr… At least Chromebooks are easy to lock down if gadmin and 3rd party filters are set up.
Fantastic news, I’m glad they’re proactively seeking solutions
This is how the kids know they are not in an institution of learning, but a prison for the crime of being juvenile.
What we’re also not going to hear is how often devices are misplaced, confiscated without return or just dissappear like socks in a dryer.
