By Clara Atwell, Business Editor
The start of the 2017-18 school year has brought major policy changes in the areas of cell phone use, the structure of SMART periods and seating options during lunch. Students also feel that a few existing policies, the dress code for example, have become more stringent in their enforcement.
The high school does not have one particular method of policy creation. In instances of harassment and bullying, policies are left up to the school board. Otherwise, the staff works together to create policies and then presents those to the administration, or the administration sends out a staffwide survey asking for suggestions.
Policies are always made by the entire staff. They are never created solely due to the actions of one particular student or group of students unless their actions threaten the health or safety of others.
This summer, one teacher sent out an email to the staff saying that they were going to ask their students to put phones away during SMART. Within a few days, over 75 percent of the teachers responded saying that they would ask the same of their students.
There have been many complaints about excessive student phone usage during class time. Additionally, a vast amount of scientific research shows the negative impacts that phones have on teenagers.
With this in mind, Principal Danny Rock, Vice Principal Alanah Baron and the rest of the staff have teamed up to enforce the new cell phone policy consistently across the entire school.
The goal of this change was to create an environment in which students are prepared to learn in all of their classes, and additionally, one in which individual teachers do not find themselves seen as bad or strict for asking students to put away their phones during class.
“In my experience … it is hard to get teachers to come together and agree on the way in which they are going to share their practice or expectations for students … because teaching is a very personal expression of personality and values, and to share a practice among a bunch of people means that [some] people are giving up their personal freedom as teachers,” Rock said. “It has become clear to staff that there are a couple of things [like the overuse of cellphones in the classroom] that were really contributing to an increase of chaos [and] a decrease of productivity.”
SMART periods were originally established as a time for struggling students to get help from teachers and do school work that could otherwise conflict with family time or sports. Over the six years of SMART periods’ existence, they have never looked the same from one year to the next in terms of frequency, attendance rules and activities.
Last year students had the most freedom in how to spend their time during the period. They were allowed to check into any SMART classroom they wanted as well as move from class to class throughout the period. The staff observed that many students were taking the time for granted and were also getting marked absent by teachers they visited.
“The students that took advantage of SMART and used it well are the students who are able to help themselves and who are able to organize their own time,” Rock said. “The students that need help, but are not good at getting it, were precisely the students who were not taking advantage of SMART.”
Currently students must stay in their assigned SMART periods, but the administration is brainstorming a system that allows students to receive help from their teachers while ensuring that every student is incentivized to use the time productively.
This year a new curriculum called Character Strong is being delivered over the course of 25 SMART periods. This curriculum is designed to build a sense of community within students’ assigned SMART periods, as well as with their respective SMART teachers.
“We are really excited about this,” Rock said. “We think that this is going to be an effective way for teachers to get to know students outside of the academic environment [and] for students to get to know each other because they often pretend [or think they] know each other better than they really do.”
Changes have also been made to lunchtime seating rules for students. The school lost over $3,000 worth of reusable plastic plates, and the staff has had to constantly clean up after students over the past few years. Thus, the staff decided to limit the areas in which students can eat to indoors and outside at picnic tables in the courtyard and the west side of the school.
It essentially boiled down to the school not being able to afford giving students the option to eat outside.
“We spent the entire year [last year] talking to students all over campus about being stewards of that resource and cleaning up their mess, and it didn’t work,” Baron said. “So we had to do something different.”
Rock is looking for cost-effective ways to allow students to eat outside.
While the dress code remains the same from previous years, Rock recognizes the increasing frustration among students.
“The dress code has not changed since I’ve been here,” Rock said. “In fact, I didn’t change any written policy that I inherited from the previous principal; I just enforced it differently.”
Both Rock and Baron urge students to speak up if they feel targeted by the dress code or if they have a problem or suggestion about any other policy.
“I don’t ever expect us to be perfect in how we handle the dress code because it intersects with values and beliefs … We don’t have some kind of shared lens around these things, so at the end of the day it’s a judgement call,” Rock said.
The faculty believes that they can learn a lot from healthy discussions with students.
“What I would like is a way for us to talk to more students and hear them. I don’t think we have enough conversations [in which we] just sit down at a table and just talk about it,” said Baron.
However, they also understand that it is likely students aren’t going to be thrilled about every policy, particularly the cell phone policy.
The administration’s goal is to strike a balance between the interests of students and staff within the school’s academic environment.
“It’s not about whether or not we want students to feel miserable all day,” Baron said. “We want [students] to be focused on learning and be able to do their best.”