Board enacts phone policy

PALMER — According to a newly adopted policy, Mat-Su Borough students can have cell phones at school, but if they’re up to no good they shouldn’t expect privacy.

In a unanimous vote, the school board chose at its last meeting to adopt the cell phone policy.

Board President Colleen Vague asked the district employee presenting the new policy, Matt Teaford, where the search-and-seizure part of the rule came from.

“That language is lifted directly from a Supreme Court case,” Teaford said. “Other school districts have adopted standards based on this language.”

To wit, the new policy says school officials can seize and search a cell phone “during an investigation related to the suspected violation of board policy or school conduct requirement. In the course of the investigation, school officials may search information contained on the device including, but not limited to, text messages, call logs, audio and video recordings and digital photographs, in accordance with limitations imposed by state and federal law.”

As to the clause about violating board policies, the list of such policies on the district’s website includes prohibitions against things like alcohol and drugs, tobacco, steroids and weapons.

The bulk of the discussion regarding the cell phone policy centered around something that happened last year — the brief evacuation of Wasilla High School.

“Last year we had a real bad crisis at one of the high schools. We had a bomb threat, we had all kinds of law enforcement show up and the big problem was parents showing up before law enforcement,” board member Ole Larson said.

He said he’d also heard about incidents in other communities where 911 was so jammed up with calls that emergency dispatchers had trouble figuring out what was going on.

On the other hand, Larson said he’d read accounts from different communities of incidents where law enforcement was alerted to a crisis at a school because students called 911 from their cell phones.

“I don’t disagree with the policy, but I would like some tweak,” he said, to outline students’ responsibilities regarding making calls during an emergency. “I know it’s probably going to still happen, but it would be nice to bring that to light.”

Other notable aspects of the policy say that students can’t have the phone on while instruction is underway and they cannot be allowed to interrupt class.

Board Vice-President Sarah Welton said she supports these provisions, noting that in the college classes she teaches she writes on the syllabus that cell phones have to be turned off and stored.

“We do need to have control over what happens in the classroom as far as communication is concerned,” Welton said. “We can’t educate if there’s 15 kids in the class that all received cell phones calls at the same time, that were all texting people.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.