This year, changes to policy have happened at what students say is a jarring pace. Students have been hearing all about the specifics of the new policy, so let’s take a step back and focus on the “why.”

New cell phone policy:

“The whole reason for the cell phone policy is not to deal with cell phones,” assistant principal Mike Dial, Ed.D., said. “It’s to make students be able to focus more in class. We realized coming back from the pandemic, how much students were tied to technology, just because of how much time they had spent on phones on iPads on computers during that time, and they needed a little bit of a separation. And so the idea is just to create less distractions, less things that are drawing their attention away from the lesson, the assignment, whatever they’re supposed to be working on. So, if phones is something that was creating a major disruption, where kids were just unable to break that, that habit, we felt like that’s why we needed the cellphone policy.”

New disciplinary policies:

“So really, the reason for all of the new procedures that you’re seeing is school safety,” assistant principal Jackie Gosney said. “So, unfortunately, there’s just been such an increase in school violence, that we’ve had to put a lot of things into place. We were trying to show that we take that very seriously. People should not be afraid to walk around the hall and see kids get into a fight. That’s not what kids are here for. And so we’re trying to just show that we take it very seriously and if you choose to engage in any sort of fighting here at school, you’re going to have to be gone because it’s not fair to the other kids in the building to have that here. If you look at this year compared to last year. At this time, we were seeing fights a lot it felt like we were having fights at least once a week. And that hasn’t been the case this year. It just hasn’t been the kind of era or the I feel like the mood of the school. It doesn’t feel as tense as it did last year. And I think it’s because kids just know the expectations. They know that we’re taking things seriously.”