Living without a cell phone isn’t impossible. I managed to survive without my cell phone for a whole week. My cell phone was confiscated during a random scanning. A random scanning is a procedure where portable metal detectors are brought into a school by New York City Police department. The scanning detects weapons, or any electronic devices. Unfortunately, this random scanning did not take place on a day when John Dewey High School was under lockdown for two and a half hours. It was on March 27th, when a student and a teacher witnessed a gun in a classroom. Automatically John Dewey went into an immediate lockdown. Students were locked rooms, and were forbidden to use their cell phones. All the students were worried, frantic and were in dyer need to get in contact with their parents. I’m one of many students who follows the rule of not using my cell phone during school hours. On many occasions I leave my cell phone at home.
I know that The Board of Education does not allow cell phones in schools. When there is an incident that happens as serious as this one, cell phones interfere with police radio frequency. I was in a room that was dark and small and I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to call my family to tell them what was happening; to be reassured that everything would be alright. I had to use someone else’s phone to get text message my sister. I felt much better as I talked to her over the phone and calmer. But if I had my own cell phone I would’ve felt much less frantic and worried about what was occurring. The next few days were “random scanning” after the incident that had happened. I personally wanted to bring my cell phone because if there were an emergency I would want to get into contact with my parents. What I really don’t understand is that they still took away my cell phone—even though they knew that parents and students wanted to have a secure contact in place with them. Afterwards they still haven’t given back all the hundreds of phones, including my own because of the backtrack in the phone system. So now, parents have to email the school to make an appointment to pick their child’s phone.
The school itself has been “blowing off” all these important incidents that happened. There hasn’t been any assembly about the lockdown or the other incident where there was threatening graffiti on the wall. As a student I am concerned about my safety. It appears as if nothing happened and we’re just going back to our regular way. But it isn’t the same way, because students are still worried and still scared, including me. It isn’t the fact that my cell phone got taken away—because I managed to survive with out it. But the most important thing has not been address by our principle or any other school official. So what is it really going to take our school to make an effort to make a move on protecting the student body?
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