My remarks at the board of education today.

Hello, today I made a public comment at my local school board regarding cell phones, and granted the content of my last two essays it felt relevant. It has lightly been edited to remove certain mentions that pertain exclusively to my district

PHONES

I'm here to talk about phones

We keep talking about phones.

Every other week at these meetings,

But you ignore important points.

Chiefly, phones do not exist in a vacuum, they exist within a world that is dangerous, a world where a gunman could walk up to the window of the high school student center, and fire almost 200 bullets in less than a minute. You want to take away communication with the outside world when the people in power can’t take away that gun?

In a world where students are exposed to harmful teachers, who can be emotionally and physically abusive, which I have experienced.. And now you want to take away the right to communicate with parents and other trusted adults in a split second? 

In a world where more kids than ever experience anxiety disorders. You want to take away a device that can help with meditation, breathing exercises, and contanting parents, therapists, or others who may help.

You want to take this away not just during class,- as we already have done-but also during lunches, free periods, and even in between classes. this district prides itself on giving students their freedom, with things like flex and open campus, but you want to take away that freedom because of pop psychology, ignoring the harms a ban could pose. you refuse to listen to kids on this issue, which impacts us much more than any of you. I want to ask the parents pushing for this, have you tried talking to your kids? You seem to think the high school is a wasteland where students sit on their phones all day. However, I often find the noise at the high school excruciatingly loud in the halls. 

This brings me to my second point,

Student voices, administrative voices, and teacher voices have been ignored. The elementary school parents pushing for this ban are not high school students, and haven’t been for a long time. likely not since 2012, when the iphone was reaching its peak, and sandy hook happened. and CERTAINLY not since 2020, when covid happened, and we reached a peak of political violence and division in this country. but the voices of admin and students- the people living through this moment- were ignored at the last meeting. and students (myself included) rarely speak at these meetings, because unlike the people who speak weekly, we are actually high schoolers, and under an immense amount of stress, with immense amounts of responsiblities, juggling infinite activities. so it makes sense that we are all stressed to infinity, but we are stressed because of the pressure YOU as adults our on is. not from the fact that we have phones.

this brings me to my 3rd/4th point.

The policy we have in place at the high school, while restrictive, strikes a balance between restriction freedom. A ban on bell to ball would be unbalanced, perhaps tyrannical It would also cost an egregious amount of money, at minimum 11k, which could be beter spent on fixing bathroom doors, the flooding, or numerous other sisues at the high school.

but no,

you want to ban phones.

well i say screw that.

you can take my phone when there’s a federal ban on assault weapons

till then,

i’ll take a detention if i have to.

thank you.

thank you all for reading!

-Aarav