Phone Confiscated in Primary School

I also believed kids shouldn't have phones until they were older. Then Rainaud (?) Murray was stabbed while walking home. She dragged herself almost home, her parents house was a couple of hundred yards away. She was not robbed and I felt if she'd been able to make a call she'd be alive today. I went out and bought my youngest a phone the day after. It proved invaluable when coming home on her own in the dark evenings, she'd ring home and I'd talk to her while she went through the 'dark patch' near our house. It used to be that children and the aged were off limits to thugs...not so any more I'm afraid.
 
At my son's school they accept that teenagers carry and will bring in phones to school and they are encouraged to leave them with the secretary during the day. However it is not a rigid rule, though if they are found to even have one switched on while on the premises they are confiscated until the end of term! This was clearly spelt out to us and the students in writing and at Parent/Teacher meetings. I know of a couple of incidents where a phone has been used and confiscated, however they are generally returned after a week or so once the child and parents have been spoken to and undertaken to not let it happen again. I would suggest, if your friend was aware of the ban he should accept it with grace and maybe after a week approach the head or the school board to request it back. Threatening them with the Guards/Legal Action is blowing the whole thing out of proportion and is probably making the poor kid squirm with embarrassment, remember, it is the child who has to go in every day and face the teachers etc. Calling in the guards etc would completely undermine the school's rules and policies and would send out the wrong message.
Your friend may feel he should take it further out of principle but at the end of the day, had he/his kid respected those of the school this situation would not have occured.

As someone else said, legal action would be a waste of money and calling I am pretty sure the guards have far more pressing matters than this to deal with each day.
 
Lite,

Even when a mobile phone is switched off , you can still triangulate the signal using Mobile Positioning Systems, and should still be able to make 999 calls if out of credit.


JP,

I agree fully with everything you say, they do not want to undermine schools rules, but this issue is outstanding 3 weeks, and school should have dealt with his parents like adults, nobody needs their time wasted with this .....


Thanks for all the opinions.
 
while it might not be correct there could be an element of the school taking a hardline with parente as well as children.

I'm familiar with "school workings" and the parents are worse then the kids. Some of the accusations they make towards teachers.... and they demands they make!!!

My point is that it is all very tiring to have deal with "annoying" parents on top of dealing with sometimes out of control children. Perhaps the teacher and principal are fed up and have set out the rules and that's just that and tough luck!!??
 
Just got this in an email ... 2nd last point is particularly apt!

BORN BEFORE 1986?

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who werekids in the 60's, 70's and early 80's probably shouldn't have survived, because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured Lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans. When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokey's' on our wheels.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags and riding in the passenger seat was a treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same.

We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no-one actually died from this.


We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.
After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.

We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all.

No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chatrooms.

We had friends - we went outside and found them. We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt! We fell out of trees, got cut, and broke bones but there were no law suits.

We played knock-the-door-run-away and were actually afraid of the owners catching us. We walked to friends' homes. We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn't rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls. We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of...they actually sided with the law.

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
 
If indeed the phone was off and was in his pocket - how did the teacher/principal know that he had a phone with him?
 
Don,t remember saying phone was in pocket ...., did say phone was off though.


We sided with many authority figures years ago, through sheer belief they had a greater level of intelligence, luckily nowadays, we speak up more when we believe they are wrong.
 
The idea that ANY parent would even consider involving the law in such a situation is simply laughable to me. It shows how much Irish society has slid towards the litigatious American model which is no credit to anyone.

I'd respectfully suggest that if you were any kind of friend to your mate that you'd advise him to get a life and another phone for his sprog which could be volunteered to the secretarys office on entering the school each morning.

To be outraged on his behalf is simply stunning to any one of right mind!
How in the name of God can schools hope to maintain any kind of discipline if every child is allowed to do as he/she wishes for fear of a court case??

Perhaps the correct course of action is to school the kid at home and then, hey, sure you wouldn't have to worry about rules and regulations that weren't imposed my your own good self.
 
Well if he was my child, I'd firstly ascertain whether he had broken school rules, even if the teacher was a bit over the top. If he did break the rules, then I'd buy another less 'cool' mobile and deduct the cost out of his pocket money over time.

The teachers in this scenario obviously felt he was breaking rules although if they admit the phone was off, I genuinely don't know why he wasn't just told to keep it in his bag in future.
 
so what exactly is the problem with kids having mobile phones in school ?

I dont see the problem unless they were using it during class . Otherwise Its puritanical hair shirt nonsense .
 
My friends son had his mobile phone confiscated in school, he was in hte toilets , and the phone was swiched off.
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To be honest, it sounds as if the child is being economical with the truth. How would a teacher know a boy has a turned off phone in the toilet? The phone must have been switched on & rang or must have been in the kids hands or the kid was found using it. Teachers dont search kids pockets when they have their pants down taking a p in the toilet, so the kids story doesnt add up.
 
stir crazy said:
so what exactly is the problem with kids having mobile phones in school ?

I dont see the problem unless they were using it during class . Otherwise Its puritanical hair shirt nonsense .
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Well lets see.... here are some possibilities...
1) Children arranging fights via text messages (I know of a situation where this was happening)
2) Children bullying other children via text message
3) Children engaging in "happy-slapping"
4) Children humiliating other children by taking embarrassing pictures of them
....

just a small sample but the facts are this:
1) a parent should contact the school not the child as otherwise they are being disruptive
2) a child can ask the school to contact a parent/guardian if needed, we have simply become so dependent on the immediate accessibility that mobile phones provide that we forget simple procedures and courtesies
3) children are inventive, even when it comes to making other people's lives a misery - their exploits with mobile phones are well-publicised, the list above does not do justice to their creativity
4) you are dependent on the good nature of the child to ensure that the phone is switched off (is it not at all possible that the child had the phone on and as the door started to open switched it off???) Otherwise you need to constantly check the phones of possibly several hundred children in a school - blocking the signal is not an option.
5) School rules banning mobile phones have been introduced invariably because of the unenforceability of switching off phones in schools and the annoyance, distraction, irritation, danger, etc that their being on results in.
6) I hate to say this to you but a mobile phone is intrinsically no more special a piece of property than a diary is. The ability to track a signal is wonderful but hopefully something that no child should have to depend on (to note it's most infamous use in tracking that poor child in Cork was not as a result of the child living in a "bad area")
7) You can dial 999 or 112 from any phone ... including those provided in the school.

Call me suspicious but I would reason it went something a little more along the lines of the teacher suspected the child was texting/photographing and went into the bathroom to investigate, the child had the phone in hand and switched it off as soon as the door started opening, the teacher stated it was off because it was so when they were handed it (probably after a verbal exchange and some protesting from the child while they waited for it to shut off) but the teacher probably suspected that it had been on with good reason. They confiscated the phone in accordance with the school rules (I am assuming this is the case since CrumDub hasn't stated otherwise) and decided to fully enforce it because they have had a problem with this rule being circumvented by pupils using the toilet as an area for texting. The parent (good, bad or indifferent is not really a concern in this case - good parents make bad decisions sometimes) decided to take umbrage at this because they had shelled out money for this and now the child had had it confiscated and decided to "talk" to the principal. Not to cast aspersions but it wouldn't surprise me if the parent became rather heated in their insistence that the phone be returned immediately especially faced with a principal who possibly has a discipline problem and wants to make a statement by rigid application of the rules and one red-faced, shouting parent too many to deal with.


We sided with many authority figures years ago, through sheer belief they had a greater level of intelligence, luckily nowadays, we speak up more when we believe they are wrong.
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I would be inclined to say we sided with many authority figures because we entrusted serious decisions to them. We still do. Questioning of authority is nothing new either, we didn't invent it, nor did the anarchists of the late 18th century.
I would like to point out that the authority figures are also sometimes right, even if we don't agree with them. Belief isn't justification, evidence and logic are.
The child broke the rules, may have broken other rules but the teacher wisely punished the child for the only rule that they saw and had evidence had been broken.
 
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Look - this thread is going off the rails. Headteachers are responsible for the pupils and the goings on in a school. Most teaches try to assist them. However I know the frustration that parents have in cases like this. Maybe this is a good kid, well behaved, well mannered and not involved in trouble. Did the OP ever consider that it might be best to teach him an early lesson rather than send him down a completely different route. Primary school is a foundation stone for the life cycle - this is why it is so important.

A similar post is on today and my reply was:

Re: Can a teacher check a pupil's phone for "inappropriate content"? John Rambo you are 100% correct. I have heard so many of these cases in some of the most 'snobby' schools in this country and as well as the not so snobby, when parents after incidents described choose to attack the teachers of the Head, instead of stepping back and assessing the situation. Most teachers are trying to do the best for the kids they are educating and also to make sure the environment of the school is safe for all the pupils. There is a fine line between right and wrong. However in this case, I would be thanking the school for highlighting the matter and then deal with my son for hanging around with such a crowd of degenerates. Happy Slapping - bet a different view would occur if God for Bid a child suffered a fractured skull or ruptured spleen from a Happy Slapping incident. And I'm not a prude.
 
How is a mobile necessary for "happy-slapping" ? That doesnt make sense at all.



Banning phones in school outside of class time is in my opinion a nonsense. It's usually the parents who decide to give their child a phone not the teachers who have no say. They can use the phones to do exactly the same things such as bullying etc outside of school hours unless the children are hermits and come into contact with no other kids outside of the school day which is highly unlikely. Also bullying by sms provides actual proof which will hang the bully unless such a bully has money to waste on a new sim card (which would be required if the offending number was reported and shut down each time) in which case each sms will cost a lot of money. Its' not the phones which are the problem its the children who use them. Bullying as a problem isnt solved by the elimination of mobile phones. In the specific case of a phone being confiscated I find it odd if it happens with no penalty for some other behaviour. This is proof in itself that no bad behaviour was witnessed apart from the 'serious crime' of having a phone on ones hand. If the phone was used to bully then the bullying needs to be addressed in tandem with the phone being confiscated. Thats what would make sense. Not some luddite anti phone approach. Children need to be prepared in school for the real world where people have phones and be prepared with the best way to deal with bullying in the workplace when they grow up. Bullying is insidious and existed long before the existance of mobile phones. Children need to be educated about the correct way to handle a bully and the same goes for teachers who need to discover and attend to both bullys and victims . Its that simple.
 
stir crazy said:
How is a mobile necessary for "happy-slapping" ? That doesnt make sense at all.
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It is common for happy-slapping incidents to be recorded using a mobile and then the incident replayed to friends or even unfortunately put online. Sad but true.
 
Sorry Stircrazy but you don't seem to be getting the point. Mobile Phones in a school can be used for a number of othr reasons than the main reason they were intended. Bullying on its own is bad - with a Mobile the Bully can simply assemble all their friends to cause further problems to the party been affected. The Principal and teaches operate the school - they set the rules and if the rules state No Phones, it should mean No phones. I am unable to understand your reasons on this one. Maybe we should have the lunatics running the asylum.
 
Anybody who knows anything about bullys knows that they operate inside and outside of school grounds. So when a child is beaten up by a bully after school on the way home and can`t call for help because of a stupid school rule.

The impression I get from all this is that the schools are more concerned about their rules than the saftey of children. The best and easiest solution to the whole matter would have been for the school to have the school secretary take the phones in the morning then return them in the afternoon then they can`t be used during school hours.

As a parent myself I plan to give my boy a phone once he starts to do stuff by himself and god help anybody who endangers my boy for the sake of a stupid school rule.

Regarding those fine people who get to be headmasters recently I saw a story about a head master who bullied 5 or 6 of his staff, one can only wonder how many pupils have been traumitised by this person over the years.
 
If this child is 12, in Primary school and his parents are so worried about the area he lives in then why don't the make certain there is someone to meet him at the gate and take him home every day without fail.
If a teacher took this kids phone and something happened to him on the way home then the teacher would be blamed and not the parents who allowed their child to walk home alone through a rough area. Typical.
 
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