MIke Kline / CC
The school bell is about to ring but one thing that won’t be ringing is a cellphone. Franklinton Senator Beth Mizell authored a bill to keep phones from becoming a distraction for both teachers and students.
“Let’s get back to traditional learning and make that the priority instead of making a student feel like his attention is in competition with the phone in the classroom,” said Mizell.
When the bill was in committee at the legislature, Mizell said award-winning educators testified that cell phones were among the biggest issues when trying to keep a student’s attention.
“I think that really gave the committee a lot of comfort in supporting the bill knowing that the teachers saw the value in it,” said Mizell.
In her research, Mizell said many psychologists pointed out that students paying attention to a phone all the time instead of talking to each other was having detrimental effects on learning how to interact with other humans.
“The other states that have done it the conversation is wow, the kids are talking to each other in the hall, they’re having conversations in the cafeteria instead of each of them sitting there staring at the phone,” said Mizell.
Mizell said she’s interested to see if the cellphone ban will impact future LEAP scores.
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