New Ulm High School is proud of its phone policy that has been in place since the arrival of smartphones in the early 2010s.
As high schools in Minnesota worked this past summer to develop a phone policy that complies with the new Minnesota Statute, NUHS principal Mr. Bergmann could focus his energies on other things, because the school already had a rock solid policy in place.
“I anticipated the problem then and said ‘let’s not go there,'” Bergmann said. He created a policy at the time and “our policy never changed – it didn’t have to. And I don’t plan on changing it to anymore than what we have.”
When cell phones became popular, they were meant to be more like “personal management systems” to help people stay organized, Bergmann said. But then they turned into something much more, and adults and students took advantage of that. They became a distraction, and Mr. Bergmann knew there needed to be some policy to help the student body stay on track.
“When we are in a school environment, obviously our number one goal is for students to learn and when they are distracted by things like a phone that they can go into when there is downtime in a class, well, then there is a problem,” Bergmann said.
Cell phones can create a variety of distractions, from simple video games or music searches that can be easily redirected, to more harmful ones that can seriously impact mental health. “Some of the social emotional things that come from phones, like a down time might be I check my phone and all of a sudden I get a message from a friend that something bad happened, or somebody said this about me can seriously distract from the education,” Bergmann said.
In fact, while the rest of the state is scrambling to restrict student phone use, NUHS is actually somewhat loosening its policy. “Originally it was the minute you walked in you put your phone away and couldn’t use it until the end of the day,” Bergmann said. And the penalties were real: a five day confiscation of the phone after the third violation.
But the policy has changed as the times have changed. “We’ve progressed. We have flexible scheduling – Earlybird class, Wednesday night, college classes where you get time off for – so we had to say when you come into school and you start class, that’s when you put your phone away,” Bergmann said.
That was the first amendment to the original policy. The second was: “And then we recognized that one of the things we were finding was that parents were communicating with their kids and their kids were getting their phones taken away because their parents were texting them and communicating with them and we said, wait a second, how much can we penalize a student for that, so then we said that during lunch students could be on their phones,” Bergmann said.
And the penalties also changed. Now after the third violation the student gets detention, and a call home.
“I want to simulate a work environment, to set up the young adults for the adult world,” Bergmann said. Using your phone respectfully at school will help students grow and understand the adult workforce.
