Conroe ISD Cell Phone Committee Meeting 1

Let’s process this together, shall we?

Sep 08, 2023

From CISD Cell Phone Commitee Overview - Link

*These are my personal notes and thoughts, which do not represent the district or committee as a whole, nor do they reflect what the cell phone policy may or may not become.

Here are my notes and general thoughts on the first committee meeting from a day 1 perspective. I expect my opinions to possibly change or shift as we make progress. The presentations I am sharing come from the CISD website found here.

A Recap

For those who have missed the last few months of CISD activity, back in August the CISD School Health Advisory Council (SHAC) gave a presentation to the Board about cell phone usage and their impact on student mental health, among other things. You should watch it for yourself (turn up the volume):

Conroe ISD Board Meeting August 1 2023 (Starts 2:29:45)

To summarize, SHAC recommended changes to the personal cell phones guidelines as a district. Dr. Null and the Board recommended we bring in more community members to discuss, and so a committee was created to include parents, teachers, counselors, and admin to discuss these changes, and then bring back a recommendation to the Board at a future meeting.

The district sent out an invite for people to apply for the committee, and now here we are.

The Committee

This is my first time on a CISD committee, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was also only my second time to be at the Jett Center, the first time for when Denise won her 2nd Teacher of the Year award (note humble brag). It is a nice facility in a convenient location.

This first meeting was spent with district admin, staff, SHAC, and an independent counselor - all giving their presentations on the topics of cell phone usage in schools. They revolved around mental health, social media, foundations, and other topics that some of us had seen before at previous Board meetings and other events. They then gave us homework (the gall!). Here is the general breakdown and summaries:

Purpose

The purpose of this committee is to evaluate and come to a consensus on updates to the existing guidelines, using the SHAC recommendations as a starting point. These updated guidelines will then be presented to the Board for adoption. Similar to the Bond Committee, we could come up with a great set of guidelines, but it is still up to the Board to adopt them by vote.

Committee Members

The makeup of the Committee is as seen above, and one of the first questions asked by a parent was, “How was the committee selected?” Dr. Medford discussed the process for how it worked, which started with the 250+ applications they received. For parents, it was first filtered to exclude CISD employees (or anyone with a conroeisd.net email address), then by feeder zone, by student grade level, and randomly from the final list. The goal was to get as equal representation from the district as possible.

Admin, teachers, and counselors were also selected per feeder zone to represent the schools in the area, as well as members of the original SHAC Mental Health Sub Committee to share their knowledge and research on the topic.

For attendance, my rough estimate is about 95% of the people selected for the committee attended this first meeting.

SHAC Presentation

If you watched the YouTube video linked above, then you should have a good idea of what SHAC is recommending and what this new committee will be reviewing. They provide many details around the impacts of screen time, social media use, ‘school connectedness’, vision changes (e.g., myopia), safety while walking (I call this “glow face”), cyber bullying, and others to make the case for the why this must be addressed.

These are important issues that impact our kids, and it is clear why we need to update the guidelines as a district.

Current CISD Board Policy & Guidelines

What we have today:

In the current guidelines, note the word ‘Generally’. This was also noted by Dr. Medford in her presentation as one reason why the guidelines are open to so much interpretation by each school. It is also not clear for parents in my opinion.

Getting to the meat of it, here is what SHAC is recommending for changes as presented by Dr. Bryce Speer, SHAC Chair, and is what the committee is reviewing and providing input on. I added a few words to help break it down:

Kinder - 8th Grade

During school hours, students will continue to have access to their cell phones during emergencies. Student security and access to phones during campus emergencies should remain unchanged.
Any student on a 504 or IEP that requires the use of a cell phone or other electronic devices should maintain use consistent in the approved 504 or IEP.
Phones can be used before school and after school dismissal.
General policy: “Away for the day”. Phones should be set on silent, kept in backpacks, and should not be visible during school hours including classroom time, lunch, hallways, restrooms, and locker rooms.

9th Grade - 12th Grade

Includes emergency use and 504/IEP items noted above.
Phones can be used before school and after school dismissal.
Phone use should be avoided during school day but may have access during designated periods that does not include lunch.
Total of 20 minutes a day.

School & Classroom Direction

Guides school staff to not communicate about school events or extracurriculars in a manner that would require students to have their cell phones, such as via text message. Instructs to use traditional methods like school monitors, announcements, canvas, Chromebooks, etc.
No more using student cell phones to access forms, QR codes, online games, etc.
Cell phones should not be used to incentivize behavior or to fill classroom time when there is “free time”. As in, don’t allow students to use their phone after they finish a task or use it as a carrot for them to complete a task.
For 9-12th, on occasions where extracurricular communication must occur during school hours, students will be able to check for messages during designated cell phone periods throughout the school day (within the 20 minutes a day).
Support students with appropriate interventions based on mental health concerns.
Hold students accountable for non-compliance with cell phone policy.

And that’s where we begin.

Parent Questions

These were the questions asked by parents:

How was the committee selected?
Which sources are you using from your research?
How can we involve more than two students from the district for the committee?

We discussed the first one already. For research sources, I added them to the bottom of this post, and for question three I have one comment you’ll read below.

Surveys

For data collection on the topic of cell phones, the first survey that went out to parents this week was purposely meant to be simple in order to not overwhelm the discussion from the beginning. We will see those results next meeting.

More surveys are planned to be sent out.

My Thoughts

I have written policy on mobile devices in my corporate role, which included a lengthy section on personal device use for all of our facilities worldwide. Policy and guidelines are meant to provide boundaries and set expectations. I believe the SHAC guidelines could use a bit more of each rather than leave too much to interpretation at the local level.

Also, one key item I find useful is to provide FAQs within policy to make it easier to read. I’m not sure that can be done here, but I will be asking more about how we can add helpful references or examples within the guidelines.

Although SHAC is focusing on mental health, my immediate thoughts are about classroom disruption and how teachers are left to deal with cell phones on their own much of the time. If you have read any of my other blog posts here, then you know we have been critical of how certain schools do not have effective administrators. And yet even when repeated events occur related to local admin, corrections are not made that is visible to staff.

Any guidelines around cell phones must not only be clear for students and parents but give principals and APs the direction and reinforcement they need to drive these new rules.

Moving on, these guidelines need to be inclusive of more than just cell phones in my opinion. It should include the following:

Personal smartphones, tablets, personal computers
Smart watches (these open up a whole other can of worms)
Earbuds, headphones
Handheld gaming devices like Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, etc.

Other thoughts:

“20 minutes a day” for grades 9-12 is too vague and still leaves too much to interpretation. Who is going to track this across classrooms? How will ‘designated periods’ work?
Why is lunch not a good time to have phone access if they don’t have it the rest of the day?
For the questions on getting student input on these new rules, I may be against the grain, but pretty sure they’re all going to say they don’t want rules. Parent and school staff voices should be the priority on this one.
I wish we could bring busses into this discussion, but that seems near impossible to manage.

Lastly, there is already existing cell phone policy at certain schools in the district, much of which has been praised by parents and teachers alike. As there are several school principals on the committee, I look forward to hearing their success stories and failures on cell phones. One of these schools is York Junior High, which I was lucky to sit next to the York principal, Lindsay Ardoin.

She moved to York this school year and one of their first big changes was to add a policy on phones. In previous years the school had a real issue with social media, where kids were recording teachers, videoing fights in the bathrooms, etc. The new rule is basically no phones at all except at lunch. They are still monitoring results, but the two big observations are that 1) It is working really well, and 2) Lunch time incidents have gone way down…because they’re all on their phones.

There is much to learn on what works and what does not, and it should be noted that although not all schools are alike, and some may need certain adjustments, cell phone use seems pretty cut and dried to me. One properly created guideline should effectively work at all schools.

Homework

The Committee has been asked to reach out and ask for community feedback and then report back at the next meeting. I think we already have several debates raging on the topic in the local Facebook groups, but let’s keep it going!

Meeting 2 Update

SHAC Sources

Here are the primary sources referenced by SHAC in their presentation. I have not read these yet:

The Relationship of School Connectedness to Adolescents’ Engagement in Co-Occurring Health Risks: A Meta-Analytic Review - Link
Not all screen time is created equal: associations with mental health vary by activity and gender - Link
Facebook’s emotional consequences: Why Facebook causes a decrease in mood and why people still use it - Link
Social comparisons on social media: The impact of Facebook on young women's body image concerns and mood - Link

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