To the Principal:

Student's love their cell phones, I know this from experience. Being a student myself, I can safely tell you that the students will not be happy at all if you ban cell phones from your school completely. They will almost always have them anyway, and find ways to call or text each other during class. These and other reasons lead me to believe that you should choose Policy 1.

I can easily understand your leaning toward Policy 2, because you are a principal, but I still think Policy 1 is best. Although cell phones can be very annoying to teachers and fellow students, they are very helpful also. They allow students to communicate with each other if there is a problem or a change in schedule. For example: the basketball team is having a team meeting at lunch and there is one player who doesn't know. No one can find him anywhere, so just text him! It's a quick and efficient way to update him or her on the lunchtime happenings.

Also, cell phones can be critical to a students safety. Maybe after school a student who cant drive cannot find his or her ride home. Or, some students are bullying him to the extreme, where he might get hurt. A cell phone could be very handy in either of those scenarios. He could call him ride home and find out where it is, or he could call 911 if the upperclassmen were hurting him badly.

You know how teenage students are, they don't want to follow the rules. This leads me to believe that even if you try to ban students from bringing cell phones to school, they will almost find ways to secretly text during class or in the hallways. Hiding them in backpacks, texting in the bathroom, and putting them in sweatshirt pockets are all ways that they could get around the policy.

If you think about it, it might just be a waste of time and energy trying to enforce such an extreme policy if students are not going to obey it anyway. But if you choose Policy 1, and have a little talk with the students telling them that they can still text their friends, but just between classes and during breaks, I think they will understand. I know I would. Of course i would punish them if they did text during class, but not in the hallways or at lunch. It's not extremely binding, but somewhat limiting, which is O.K. I mean, we're with all our friends anyway!

Sincerely,

An Understanding Student