By KAI HUGESSEN
It may have come as quite a shock to those who keep their eyes to the ground, but the school has a known record of rules regarding cellphones.
The El Camino administration has a history of cracking down on these rules as needed. The school first cracked down on student cellphone usage in 2018, prior to which the school operated on an honor system. This meant students were expected to keep their phones hidden and pay attention to the class.
This system proved ineffective and incompatible with students’ workload in class, and so the Administration announced a total ban on cellphones. In response, 11th grade students stepped in to appeal for a compromise solution in which the phones remained with us, but not on us.
Thus began the current practice of turning in cellphones to the teacher, only to have it returned at the end of class. The system was unpopular, but seemingly effective, for a time.
Flash forward to November, 2019. A standard day 6, unsurprising and uninteresting until we were held in Homeroom.
Mr. Heath Sparrow, school principal, came to each and every class, and made an announcement that following this hour, every student must turn in their phone, with no exceptions and no tolerance for those who defy the rules.
“If one of you breaks the rules, then I am going to have to put in a ban. No phones for any reason, at all,” Mr. Sparrow warned.
A similar announcement was made to the parents and teachers, in writing, explaining the rules and the day’s events.
“It was clearly explained that there is now a total suspension of cell phone
use in classes for any reason (also educational) because the freedom given to students did not align with the agreement of appropriate use and responsibility,” the announcement read.
This misalignment with the previous agreement was cited during the announcement, and included such infractions as cyberbullying, filming teachers and fellow students without consent, and social media exploitation, as well as a general disregard for the box rule.
Following the announcement, some students were assigned the responsibility of collecting the classes phones, and since then we’ve had limited incidents of disobedience regarding the crackdown, or at least none to the scale where the total ban would be put in place.
Reporters from the Camino Hawk soon set out to figure out the common opinion. The common line? Defeat and compliance.
“Even one case of cyberbullying would be enough to restrict the usage of cellphones” commented Michael Jeremiah Kucera Peralta, of 12th grade.
“I don’t think they should be banned outright,” he added.
One of his classmates, Keyce Lozano, concurred.
“I don’t think [the total ban] is fair to those who are doing the right thing, but it is a good incentive to have us band together. I think that if I end up seeing one of my classmates on their phone, I would tell them to put it away, and that they would do the same for me”