Danielle Frenzel of Orchard Drive in Redding walked up to the podium at Joel Barlow High School on the evening of May 26 and spoke for barely thirty seconds. She had come, she said, to support a proposed bell-to-bell ban on personal devices in our school system.
The policy, she told the Boards, “helps parents like me, parents like them, and parents of our entire community feel willing and able to stand up against their own fight with their children, against cell phones, with technology, and every other evil thing that’s creeping in their path.”
A mother at a well-worn podium with a microphone, asking the school board to help her hold a line she could not hold alone.
Eleven days earlier, the Vatican released Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Paragraph 142 reads almost as if it had been written with this particular Board of Education meeting in mind: “It is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time. Therefore, it is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task.”
The encyclical and the Redding mother were saying the same thing. I’m not sure if Frenzel was influenced by the encyclical, but I’m certain the pope was influenced by her.
The boards debated the policy for about ninety minutes. There was broad agreement on a ban from kindergarten to eighth grade, but there were differences of opinion regarding the high school. Kristen Falzone, an Easton board member, made the case that the policy as drafted was the wrong tool: the potential expulsion penalty was too severe, the search-and-seizure provisions raised due process concerns, and data specific to Joel Barlow was lacking. “I have not seen any evidence,” she said, “of bell-to-bell banning of cell phones improving students’ academic performance or mental health well-being.” Devon Wible made the case that emerging research shows bans result in significant improvements, the harms are documented, and that school is more than just test scores, but raising responsible community members. Being a community member, she said, was about learning “how to collaborate, coordinate, and connect with others.”
Laura Worosz, Chair of the Redding board, put it bluntly “If they have access to social media during the day,” she said, “we’re effectively giving them a drug and allowing it to permanently wire their brain.” The impacts, she said, could be life-long. Falzone then pointed out that if students were allowed to bring their personal laptops, the policy would effectively allow them to have a bigger version of their phone. A ban on personal computers was not up for discussion, creating a paradox.
When it was time to vote, Easton split three in favor and three opposed, meaning the joint policy was effectively dead. Twenty minutes of negotiation followed, particularly focused on consulting with students and teachers at the high school. The other boards asked Easton to reconsider so that consideration for the unfinalized policy could continue. In response, Easton member Jessica Zannetti made a motion for reconsideration. A second vote was held, and this time Easton voted five to nothing, with one abstention, to pass the policy. Now the draft heads to second reading, with the explicit understanding that students, teachers, and Joel Barlow administrators will be brought into the conversation before the next vote.
Children need to understand how these technologies work. They need to know that on most platforms, the user is not a customer, but the product, with their attention sold by the second to whoever pays the most for it. Schools are the right partners for parents in setting boundaries, because schools offer something the internet and algorithms cannot: in Leo’s words, “a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” Teachers will also need continuous training in these technologies. No teacher should lead a class of digital natives while being unfamiliar with how the technology functions. A bell-to-bell ban is a sensible starting point, though for high school with personal laptops permitted, the harder questions sit at the service-provider level, what the school’s WiFi servers allow, and whether a personal laptop with iMessage is just a large phone.
I applaud the three boards for moving the bell-to-bell ban forward to a second reading. The three Easton members who were initially opposed listened, negotiated, and then changed their positions to reflect the commitments made, two to yes, and one to abstain. That is what good faith leadership looks like. At the beginning of the meeting in public comment, Danielle Frenzel asked for a partner. With the ban passing to a second reading, our schools are on the way to becoming one.
The Cultural Easton 