For the last few months, I have been reading stories in the OBSERVER about how area schools are dealing with student cell phone usage during the school day.

When I was in school cell phones didn’t exist, so students were essentially incommunicado during the school day, allowing us to concentrate on what we were there for; to learn. If someone needed to get in touch with us in case of a family emergency, they could call the school office.

Even though I have owned several cell phones over the last twenty plus years and we no longer have a landline at our home I still think of my cell phone as just a convenient replacement for the green wall phone that once hung on the kitchen wall or the yellow phone that once sat on the nightstand in our bedroom. I do sometimes text, I check the weather, or news of the New York Mets and use the alarm clock but mostly it’s in my pocket or on my desk,

Imagine my surprise last week as my wife and I waited in the Depew Amtrak station when I looked up from the magazine I was reading, to find that the 100 or so college students also waiting for the train were sitting entranced over their cell phones either texting, on social media or playing some game with nary a sound coming from them. Even my wife was reading something on her Kindle. Surprised, I was almost ready to grab my phone so I would fit in. But I soon calmed and went back to my magazine.

Cell phones are everywhere with just about everyone owning one. Except for their ringing at inconvenient times, they are harmless but useful electronic devices. However, all too often we hear and read stories of students being bullied on social media during school hours and of students using their cell phones during classroom instruction.

Local schools have spent a great deal of time, money, and effort in finding ways to control cell phone use during the school day. Dunkirk and Fredonia initially planned to use Yondr pouches to secure cell phones during the school day.

Dunkirk began using the pouches on Sept. 16 and since that time there have been incidents of vandalism and misbehavior. Reports indicate that there has been a great deal of pushback from students and numerous destroyed pouches.

Fredonia High School Principal Darrin Paschke was “pleasantly surprised” at the response of students, adding that during the first five days of school only six cell phones had been taken from students. That seems like a lot to me and it makes me wonder how many were not caught and seized. Paschke originally planned to implement the use of the Yondr at the beginning of the school year but delayed that implementation because students have responded so well to the program by leaving cell phones in their lockers where they are available for emergency use.

In Silver Creek, Superintendent Katie Ralston has been quoted as saying imposing cell phone restrictions on students would be “an incredibly difficult undertaking.” The district further stated that it has not and will not ban cell phones until the state Department of

Education decides whether or not to restrict cell phones during the school day at which time it will apparently comply with state guidelines. Ralston further stated that “There also is the appropriate way to use cell phones and there is the appropriate time to use cell phones. We have to teach them how to do that, like we do everything else in schools.” It seems to me that just telling students to leave their phones at home would probably be more effective and teach them that some rules are imposed on us for our own good and that of others.

In the end it seems to me that everyone involved should be less concerned about cell phones in our schools and more concerned about faltering student achievement. My concern arises from a reading of the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, where students in the United States were shown to have fallen below the average of other developed nations in math while performing slightly above average in science and reading literacy. Overall, the U.S. ranks 34th behind most European nations plus Canada, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Republic of Korea, Vietnam, and the island nation of Malta.

We should also be concerned by the results of third through eighth grade testing by the state Department of Education which indicate that in most county school districts students are struggling to gain proficiency in English language arts and math.

Taken together these test results should be a cause of concern for school boards, administrators, faculty, and parents. There is little doubt that cell phones are part of the problem. and do little or nothing to improve the learning environment or student performance. There also appears to be enough empirical evidence showing cell phones to be a hindrance.

I think that anything that harms student learning should be eliminated including cell phones. Students should be made to understand that unless the learning environment is improved and with it student achievement the U.S. will be at a disadvantage competing in the coming world economy leading to increased unemployment and fewer well-paying jobs in our nation.