All views shared in the Opinions section of the Chatterbox belong to their respective authors, and may not represent the views of the publication as a whole.
Since I started at this school in 2021, I’ve enjoyed many WHHS rights that I’ve taken for granted. However, as new policies have been implemented, school has become more and more restrictive.
You can’t walk around in the mornings anymore because of “safety issues.” There’s a looming potential of assigned seats every lunch to incentivize good behavior and no one can eat outside. Since these changes, school has felt like a prison. Many students have accepted the new rules; however, the most resistance has been sparked by the Yondr pouches.
From petitions to ideas for walkouts, many students have been heavily opposed to the pouches. Many teachers at WHHS also share this opposition to the pouches.
“We as an educational institution should be teaching our students how to live in the world that they are about to be entering,” Brian Meeron, a calculus teacher, said, “and nobody has ever been taught how to use something they’re not allowed to possess.”
But what do people at other schools think?
“There were even some students who said that [yonder pouches] changed everything for them… they were happier and they had [fewer] distractions and less stress,” Julie Sellers, president of the teacher union, said.
At Hughes STEM High School, the principal reported that the students at first resisted but eventually submitted to the pouches. Sounds almost like a Stephen King book.
On top of this, Yondr bases its claims about improved student performance on many statistics from studies done years ago, most recently in 2017, five years ago. With the current rate of tech evolution, five years is a long time, making the study hardly applicable to modern times.
WHHS is somewhat a special case, since students are by default more academically focused because of the entrance exam.
“We haven’t had a lot of issues as far as consequences,” Ashley Morgan, interim principal, said. “If a teacher said, ‘We’re doing something where phones should be away,’ problems have been very minimal.”
At the beginning of the year we were promised no pouches, just for the district to switch up on us. In study halls we heard we’d be able to have our phones, not anymore.
The biggest issue with all of this is the lack of consideration. The district’s word can just change at a whim, likely making our mornings and afternoons terrible, trying to make it to class on time or to the bus after standing in line to swipe your pouch.
Trying to communicate with people will be nearly impossible. Trying to find your friends at lunch will now be a full hunt, wasting valuable lunch time.
Trying to talk to your parents about staying after school? You now have to go down to the office for what could’ve been a quick text, causing arguably an even bigger disruption than if there were no pouches.
While phone use may be a large issue at some schools, WHHS has done a good job at managing it on its own.
Each teacher uses what policy works best in their view, either putting your phone in the wall bag, putting it in your book bag, or putting it on your desk. These strategies worked, there was rarely an issue.
“[The school’s official policy is] phones should be stored away in backpacks unless otherwise advised by the teacher,” Morgan said.
This worked: there was an official policy and all requirements were met. However, for some reason, we were still required to get the Yondr pouches.
Ultimately, I believe Yondr will be a failed experiment, and I doubt it will do much to benefit WHHS other than frustrating students.
“We can just see how it goes,” Morgan said, “maybe it’ll be amazing and maybe it won’t, but time will tell.”