CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A significant amount of public feedback is coming in to the Kanawha County Board of Education regarding their developing cell phone ban policy.
After launching a public comment portal regarding the new policy on the board of education’s website a little over a week ago, KCS Board President Ric Cavender said on 580 Live Tuesday that they have already received more feedback on this particular topic than on any other in quite some time.
He said their aim is to have a fully-developed classroom cell phone ban policy in place prior to the coming school year, so they’re looking for a lot of public feedback.
“We want to make sure we get really good feedback from all of our parents, students, faculty members, the public in general to help us best shape this policy that we have to put in place at this point,” Cavender said.
The KCS Board held its first reading on the developing policy at its July 7th meeting. In a draft version of the policy, students would be allowed to have their phones on campus, but would not be permitted to have it during classroom instruction time, and phones would would need to be kept elsewhere.
Cavender said while many actually consider it to be a positive move to ban cellphones in the classroom based on the feedback they’ve been getting, there has been some parents addressing concerns over the safety of their child during the school day when they’re not in contact with them.
He said that as far as those safety concerns go, he wants parents to know that developing advanced school safety infrastructure and protocols have been a top priority to them in most recent years after investing a significant amount of money through the school excess levy toward security upgrades.
Cavender also said that all protocols are in place if any type of emergency were to arise.
“All faculty is trained on what to do, administration is trained on what to do, as you know, we have CPOs in a lot of the schools, now we’ve added through the excess levy this past cycle even more officers that are randomly in schools every single day,” he said.
Cavender said there has been an ongoing pilot program at Horace Mann Middle School where they have implemented something known as a Yondr Pouch that provides individual students a place to store their mobile devices in during the day– the only school in the county that has utilized the pouches.
He said as a parent of a child that attends Horace Mann, he has seen the benefits of these pouches first-hand.
“I can tell you as a parent, overall the distractions are way down, you know, unnecessary situations that arise when students have their devices all day long, those aren’t happening, students are actually communicating with one another at lunch time,” Cavender said.
He said there’s a big expense that comes with these pouches, though, and the school system simply does not have the means to acquire them for every school at this point in time.
However, Cavender said that in the current policy the board is working to implement, they are trying to ensure that all schools have a designated spot students can stow their phones away in throughout the day.
He said they want to create a consistent policy to achieve this that works for all schools so that individual classrooms do not have to establish their own procedures.
“We have a lot of really great teachers, a lot of great administrators throughout the entire county, and I feel confident that they’re gong to come up with a really good solution once this policy is in place from school to school,” Cavender said. “To that point, I do want to see us be as consistent as possible across the whole county so one school isn’t being treated different than any other.”
Cavender said they will have a special meeting to discuss and vote on this policy on August 11.
School starts back for Kanawha County on Friday, August 15 and Cavender said a plan will need to be in place by that point.
The public can still provide their feedback to KCS regarding the measure by emailing proposedpolicy@mail.kana.k12.wv.us.
This follows suit to what various other schools are implementing across the state as well after Governor Patrick Morrisey signed HB 2003 into law in April requiring all counties establish their own classroom cell phone ban policies.
