Pflugerville ISD has put publication of the Student Code of Conduct for the 2016-17 school year on hold as the board of trustees mulls over proposed changes to the district’s cell phone policy.
District policy for the 2015-2016 school year, and for several years prior, regarding possession of telecommunication devices or other electronic devices on campus was that students should either not have them on campus or have them turned off and not in use during the school day.
A first offense of the cell phone policy would result in confiscation of the device, and the device would be returned to the parent. Phones would be confiscated in the event of a second occurrence, with the added penalty of a $15 fine to be paid before the phone could be returned to the student’s parent. A third violation would result in confiscation, with the phone being returned at the end of the school year. The problem, said Freddie McFarland, executive director of student affairs for Pflugerville ISD, is that the policy was not working.
“The high schools were being inundated with problems about it, so this year what we did, I asked the assistant superintendents to go to the principals and find out what they wanted changed in the code of conduct,” McFarland said. “And that was the one big thing that they wanted us to address, was to get in the code of conduct something that gave elementary campuses a little more freedom to be different from secondary, and gave secondary campuses the ability to work within broad parameters, but to make decisions on their campus.”
At the July board of trustees meeting, McFarland said that schools were having difficulty enforcing the district-wide rules, particularly high schools.
“Used to be, it had to be given back to the parent,” McFarland said. “That became a real problem for an 18-year-old student who is working after school; and a parent would call up and say, ‘I’m in South Austin at work, and you have an adult in your office right now to pick up their cellphone that he’s paying for and he can’t get it.’ It didn’t make a lot of sense, it was hard to defend.”
McFarland said that campuses have been given a more leeway during the past two years to experiment with the policy to see what would work for them. As a result, campus administrators had an opportunity to lend their input to a revised cellphone policy that is in front of the board for consideration for the upcoming school year.
The revised policy would still have cell phone use prohibited on campus during school hours unless designated otherwise by the campus. McFarland gave an example to the board that a middle school might allow cellphone use during a lunch period if student conduct was otherwise good, and the cell phone taken away if behavior issues arose.
Phones would still be confiscated on second and third violations, with a $15 fine imposed before the cell phone would be returned. Under the revised code, the phone could be returned to either the student or the parent at the discretion of the school. Additionally, third offenses and beyond would require the student to face $15 fines for every confiscation going forward if the student or parent chose to regain possession of the cell phone, otherwise the school would retain custody of the phone until the end of the school year, when it would be returned to the student with no fine.
Other changes to the code that will go into effect for the upcoming school year are policies put in place on a state and federal level.
Of the changes being discussed, the only one that the board has jurisdiction over is the cell phone policy as it is determined at the district level. The district is expected to revisit the cell phone policy at an upcoming board meeting.