
School Cellphone Ban Spawns Thriving Niche Storage Market - ssclafani
http://mashable.com/2012/05/26/gadget-storage-trucks/
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petercooper
Hats off to the entrepreneurship here but the reason it's needed in the first
place is a farce. Schools should get a grip rather than be happy their
students get to fork out $22+ per month to work around their silly
restrictions.

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keithpeter
I understand what you are saying, but attention diversion is a _problem_ with
teenagers, I can tell you. They have grasshopper minds even without shiny
rectangles.

~~~
qxcv
In my experience, if there's a kid sitting in high school who's not interested
in the lesson then they'll either stare at the front of the room with their
eyes glazed over or start fidget with something (usually phones or pencils),
the former being the most popular choice since electronics tend to raise the
ire of teachers. You are sadly misguided if you think that removing phones
will turn previously disinterested students into enthusiastic participants. It
certainly will make them angry at having to pay $1 per day for "phone
parking", though.

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keithpeter
"You are sadly misguided if you think that removing phones will turn
previously disinterested students into enthusiastic participants."

Oh yes, we had lots of ways of loosing attention when I was a teenager _long_
before the invention of mobile phones.

With the phones, the disruption comes from outside in the form of messages,
not from the student's own brain. The latter can be managed by changes of
activity and movement round the space (plenary/group/present/plenary type
lessons). The former disrupts even the interested students.

~~~
jlgreco
Interested students can just put their phones on silent.

For that matter... why don't schools let kids keep their phones on silent and
in their lockers? Using your phone in class? Get yelled at. Throwing paper
airplanes in class? Get yelled at.

This is not a hard or new problem.

~~~
keithpeter
Lockers? Consequent liability. Not in UK

~~~
jlgreco
They don't have lockers? I don't even...

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Keverw
Kids aren't even allow to bring phones to school and keep them hidden in
pocket? wow... When I went to school you could use them at lunch. Is this
starting to happen all over the US or just New York? I'm in Ohio, currently.
In class you had to keep them in your pocket or purse and have the ringer off,
else teacher would take it and hold it till the end of the day. Wow. Schools
are starting to seem more and more like police states.

I would like to see schools embrace small gadgets, instead of banning them,
some how. I mean they do have lots of educational value if you want to use it
for that.

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shabble
Seems like a really neat solution to an (in hindsight) obvious problem. Makes
me think of the guy with a camper-van full of PCs dedicated to form filling
parked near the Chinese consulate in New York:
[https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/04/144636898/a-man-a...](https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/04/144636898/a-man-
a-van-a-surprising-business-plan)

I think in the prior example, they actually complained about the publicity
they were getting because it clued in competitors, without significantly
benefiting them, because their market was going to walk past the truck anyway.

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jaems33
I experienced something similar near Yankee stadium.

They don't allow men to bring bags into the stadium. But they don't have a bag
storage service (at least the last time I went). So random businesses around
it provide bag checks for a nominal fee.

Funnily enough, they allow women to bring large bags and purses inside.

~~~
maybird
Has anyone tried to contest this rule as an illegal form of discrimination?

~~~
jcmhn
Men are the oppressor gender and therefore cannot be the victims of
discrimination. Nice try, you dirty misogynist.

~~~
delan
I seriously hope you are being sarcastic.

~~~
tdoggette
He clearly is.

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vsviridov
Still have doubts that schools in US are, essentially, jails?

~~~
spindritf
Not jails, storage facilities for kids, cell phone storage is an auxiliary
service.

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keithpeter
Does anyone have references to the impact of banning electronics on school
performance? There is a similar move in the UK.

I like the retail shop storage idea; there is usually a newsagent/sweetshop
somewhere near most large secondary schools.

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damncabbage
Maybe there's also a market for lead-lined phone baggies that students can
stash in the bottom of schoolbags.

(If schools are acting like the TSA...)

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gouranga
they should just turn the classrooms into faraday cages. Problem solved and no
storage required.

Back in my day we didn't have phones in class (they were too big and
expensive). We still played up, did little work and achieved nothing :)

If the teachers gave a toss and were engaging, it would be a different story.

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Kluny
Why on earth don't the schools run this service themselves? Instead of
confiscating the phones, hold onto them in the same way the third-party
companies do. They're always complaining how they don't have enough money.

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javert
Schools that completely ban the possession of cell phones need to offer a way
for students to store their phones during the day in the lobby of the school.
They could just issue each student a tiny locker with a key.

I have multiple reasons for saying this. One reason of lesser importance (but
perhaps more interesting) is: who's to say these trucks aren't copying the
flash drives off smartphones?

I'm all for entrepreneurship but society has already decided that education is
not up for a free market, so it's not worth haggling over tiny details like
this.

~~~
lotu
Who's to say the guy watching the phones for the school isn't copying the
flash drives off the smartphones? And honestly why would they? I doubt the
contents of a teen's cell phone are very interesting and doing so would
endager their business which they take seriously enough to have a 2 million
dollar insurance policy on.

~~~
javert
As I said, the security issue here is interesting to me as somewhat of a
"hacker," but not really so important.

However, there definitely are ways to exploit this. For example, the person
holding the phones could search for nude pictures, or material in text
messages that could be used to blackmail the children (possibly the same
thing, not necessarily).

I think having a bunch of "cell phone lockers" in a _very_ public area of a
public school would guard against that kind of thing pretty effectively. It
would take a conspiracy of school employees to pull it off and really not be
worth it.

