Technology

The absolute last thing I want to do these days is to try to remove kids' ability to call for help in emergencies.

Phones are also important so that kids can receive emergency alerts, like earthquake and tsunami and tornado alerts, depending on where you live. Such emergency alert systems provide only a little bit of warning, but that can make all the difference.

You think it should be disallowed even in cases like the one described, so a parent can tell their kid pickup will be late or to catch a ride with a particular trusted adult or to walk to xyz place to wait, etc?

And they can be used to help academics, too, such as for taking notes, recording lectures (when allowed), looking up an unfamiliar word (especially for kids whose first language isn't whatever they're being taught in), taking photos of the whiteboard. And more and more, boosted by LLM tech, they're becoming helpful for things like live translation and auto-transcription (great for deaf or hard of hearing students especially, but also just for anyone who finds subtitles make audio easier to follow along with, as many people apparently do).

A school can tell kids to mute phones, and not to look at them during class (and that part's hardly new - even before phones it was games on calculators and books and magazines and passing notes), but taking them or even forcing them to be turned off (except perhaps during tests) is too much imo. Especially when kids will absolutely bring them in anyway, and the whole thing will just create more of an us vs. them dynamic with the teachers and students. And especially now that phones have become such personal devices for so many people, like an external brain filled with your secrets.