I was in Greenwich Public Schools from K-12 and graduated GHS 2016.
One kid in my elementary school, Alessandro Espa, brought his first-gen iPod Touch to class in 4th or 5th grade. He was showing off the magic trick apps of the age: the lighter, soda/beer.

The only tech hardware we'd used before then was old iMacs with yellowed vinyl keyboard covers and ancient Windows XP desktops. The Touch was like a magic alien object. Everyone was magnetically attracted to looking at it. It looked like a shiny stainless steel candy bar. Everyone in the room knew immediately they'd be the coolest if they got a phone by high school.

Previous generations got flip phones in high school - around the time they got their learner's permit. The only apps were calling, SMS, or tetris. You could tell how cool a phone was by its color. Forget swappable screen backgrounds; the coolest phone of 2006 had colorful swappable front and back plastic plates.

Sending text messages was powerful before phones arrived. It was basically telekinesis. I missed that entire era.

My generation was not satisfied with just SMS. They needed to be organizing parties through emails. They needed to be trading drugs and candy through Snapchat. They needed to be covertly taking photos of classmates and teachers and emailing them to each other. They needed to be coordinating fractal-style bullying strategies through group chats.

By the time I got to 9th grade, every one of my peers had phones: first gen Androids, Blackberries, Samsung S, their parents' old iPhones. Everything happened at once. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Temple Run. Minecraft. Tumblr. Hidemyass. Snapchat. Pinterest.

I missed the boat on most of those, but Tumblr was fun. Some friends from Syosset and I did wacky role-playing games via the anonymous question asking boxes. It was the highlight of the year.

Bart Palosz committed suicide after some kids (whose names GPS has still managed, or been bribed, to conceal) bullied him and smashed his phone. Did they ever see any consequences?

In 11th grade, was told by a teacher that I should be happy when I scratched my laptop because it meant I wouldn't be able to worship it anymore. The teacher was right.

After my 10th grade the school instituted a Chromebook program. I never picked mine up. As far as I know students only ever used them to write Google docs, watch porn, play Miniclip flash games, cyberbully each other, and click through shitty Aplia homeworks. Did any of you HN readers work on or found Aplia? If so, fuck you. Especially you, Paul Romer.

As far as I'm concerned the $250 the Chromebooks cost apiece would have been better spent on $100 of books, $100 of legal pads, and $50 of nice pens and pencils and erasers. But tragically, one just can't hustle your way to the top of GPS IT and earn a six-figure salary in Connecticut by promoting old-fashioned tech that has worked for hundreds of years. No; you need to be selling Silicon Valley dogwater HTML and plastic.

The district has a history of being dependent on technology to appear forward thinking. It aims to appear 2-3 years ahead of the rest of the country, so nobody can say "GPS should have known better!"

The only reason they're so happily agreeing to "ban" phones is that nothing has changed in the last 5-6 years. Students have gotten dumber and more addicted to technology. There's no more new technology to get a raise from introducing except maybe LLMs.

P.S. I would bet $10,000 GPS won't genuinely enforce the ban due to threats from the 20ish students in the system with paranoid billionare helicopter parents.

Sent from my iPhone