Social media is the school faculty’s worst nightmare. Day after day teachers and staff have nightmares about students running to the bathroom to film a Tik Tok and uploading it to their accounts. In order to combat this injustice, a “law” was put in place. Now students must put their phones in a “jail cell” before heading out of the classroom. Peace has been established. Staff can have sweet dreams once again. But there’s still a problem. The phone jail itself shows an increased lack of trust from staff in their students.

Phone Jail is a new system created by the school where if you leave the classroom for whatever reason, mainly for the bathroom, then you must put your phone in “Phone Jail”. This system was created due to students going to the bathroom for meetups and photo ops for social media. Of course, this system has helped with deterring students from going to the bathroom just for Tik Tok videos but it has also created another problem. The issue that is now present is the loss of faith in students who are nearing adulthood. Why can’t the staff trust these students to bring their phones out of class? How much further will this problem go? Will students eventually not be able to bring their phones into classrooms or even the school itself? Most likely not, but anything is possible. 

Phone jail may not do any harm by itself, but it’s certainly not the best solution. Although this is less efficient, perhaps our school could start teaching its students about the harm and addictiveness of social media to discourage its usage. Whether it be this solution or a new solution found in the future, it must respect the growing maturity of its students. For any of these solutions to work, however, students must also respect the staff and class time in order for any solution to work. Students not respecting the class time and teachers’ work itself is how this problem started in the first place. As adulthood approaches, it’s time for the school’s students to start growing more mature too. Respect class time and the work teachers put in. The time for social media can wait. 

Phone jail may not be inherently harmful, but it may be a sign of things to come. Many students are approaching adulthood and yet, they can’t be trusted with bringing their phones out of the classroom. Even if this does solve the bathroom problem, it is unfortunate that it has gotten to this point in the first place. The only way to solve this problem is to unite and make sure things like phone jail never have to happen in the first place.