We’re through the first quarter of the school year, and the school district is still standing strong with their regulations and policies. A substantial amount of teachers still have “No Phone Zones” hanging in their classrooms, as well as social contracts. But are all of them still enforcing the rules? Junior Maria Cecenas said, “As the year goes by, teachers are starting to stop being so strict about the No Phone Zones; I never put my phone up. They don’t really go over the social contracts, we all just kind of forgot about it. Occasionally they will remind us if we misbehave, but it rarely gets brought up.”

The purpose of the No Phone Zones are to limit the amount of time students are on their phone during class. Mr. McFarland said that a majority of office referrals were due to bad behavior on cell phones, so it is also an attempt to solve that problem. At the beginning of the school year, teachers were very strict about not having your phone. A lot of them would count you absent if your phone was not present in the caddy. There were a lot of mixed opinions and responses from both the students and staff. It was a given that a lot of the student responses were negative. The implementation caused a lot of backlash as the students had no choice but to put their phones away. The teachers, for the most part, thought it was beneficial and increased student productivity.

Social contracts were also implemented at the beginning of the school year as a way to allow students to bond with their teachers and peers. A lot of the students felt that while it was nice to set rules chosen by them, it got rather repetitive, and felt forced by the administration. Junior Sally Boese said “We never really did anything with them. We never went over anything again; it was all common sense anyway. None of my teachers ever refer to the social contract.” Many students feel as though it was a waste of time. They all know to respect each other, as well as the teacher. Teachers realize this, and that is why they lack enforcement over it.

Will these “requirements” ultimately be repealed? We’re only one quarter in, and teachers have more important things to worry about than students having their phones in their backpacks opposed to in a phone caddy, according to the general majority.