Teachers in Texas schools are already armed / School Marshals

[Hasaf]

Personally, I'd like to see cell phones banned in schools. Collect them at the end of the day; pass them out at the end.

So would I, there is a large body of evidence that the cell phones detract from learning. Here is a snip from a letter I sent to my administration. It comes down to the point that the parents insist that their child needs a cell phone and the district will not stand up and say NO.

. . . a couple of studies that have been completed in an attempt to assess the impact the impact of having cell-phones in school on education.

The first is a study completed by the London School of Economics. Here is the abstract:

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban. We use a difference in differences (DID) strategy, exploiting variations in schools’ autonomous decisions to ban these devices, conditioning on a range of student characteristics and prior achievement. Our results indicate that these increases in performance are driven by the lowest achieving students. This suggests that restricting mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities.
Source: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf

A more readable summary is provided by CNN:
The authors looked at how phone policies at 91 schools in England have changed since 2001, and compared that data with results achieved in national exams taken at the age of 16. The study covered 130,000 pupils.
It found that following a ban on phone use, the schools' test scores improved by 6.4%. The impact on underachieving students was much more significant -- their average test scores rose by 14%.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/18/technology/smartphones-schools-ban/index.html

This study was supported by a recent study conducted by the University of Chicago. Further, they determined that the negative effect of the cell-phone were present even if the cell-phone is put away, such as in a backpack. From the Abstract:
Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity.
Source: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462

The facts are that, even though they detract from the students education, the cell phones are here to stay. However, in a school shooting, the use of the cell phone presents a special risk to an armed teacher, messages can quickly go from "Mrs. X has a gun and is covering the door," to the police receiving the message that, "Mrs. X has the gun."

 

[Fine Figure of a Man]

The number of kids that will be victims of a school shooter is infinitesimal.
About a dozen a day die because of texting and driving.

 

[NIGHTLORD40K]

The number of kids that will be victims of a school shooter is infinitesimal.
About a dozen a day die because of texting and driving.

This!
All it would take would be a software update- several seconds- to eliminate the texting function. The phone could still place calls. Granted, distracted driving is never good, but texting while driving is reckless in the extreme!

There's no amendment to the Constitution protecting your right to text, either.

 

[LiveLife]

We all have the right to kill ourselves, either intentionally or by stupidity.

We just don't like being killed by someone else when we don't want to be killed.