Should The Parkland Shooting Change How We Think About Phones, Schools and Safety?

While Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was on lockdown, with an active shooter in the building, students were on their phones.

They were tweeting. They were posting on Snapchat and sending videos to friends and family. They were calling their parents to let them know they were safe and texting classmates to find out if they had survived.

Some of those posts may become evidence in the case of Nikolas Cruz, who has, according to court documents, confessed to the killing of 17 students and school personnel. This visceral record of the horrifying events of Feb. 14 is helping motivate a new conversation about gun control.

And we can only imagine the relief of the families who learned, in the moment, that their children were alive.

According to Education Week, "One girl was so emotional and overwhelmed that she handed her phone to her teacher, who reassured her mother: 'They're well taken care of. We're secure. No one is going to come in here. I will make sure that these children will be fine.' "

But do smartphones in students' hands really make schools safer? Or do they just make them feel safer? And could there be a cost to that feeling?

Ken Trump has been a school security consultant for 30 years. When he started, pagers were pretty much the only devices carried by students, and those were often associated with drug dealing or gang activity. With the advent of cellphones and then smartphones, "I was originally: No. Period," from a security standpoint, he says. But now, "the reality is, the horse is out of the barn."

That does seem to be the case. As of 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 73 percent of teenagers had smartphones. As the devices have become more common, and among younger and younger students, schools seem to have thrown up their hands.

NEA Today, the publication of the National Education Association, reported in 2016 that 70 percent of districts across the country that had once banned student phones reversed themselves and now allow them.

Source: npr