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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Freedom does not come first in all cases. There's all sorts of rights that get curtailed when you enter a classroom. For example, while Tinker v. Des Moines does protect certain nondisruptive exercises of free speech on school grounds, schools still need to have wide leeway to restrict many kinds of speech that would otherwise be perfectly legal outside school grounds. For example, many kinds of speech that would be perfectly legal outside schools will get you disciplined for bullying. Students may be allowed to wear nondisruptive things like armbands, but if a student insists on holding up a giant protest placard in the middle of their math class, the school can restrict that.
Solutions like "fund schools better" are empty platitudes.
How are they empty?
Have you been in a school? It's heavily understaffed, talk to any teacher they will say the same thing. Fund schools.
And just because rights become limited because you make an agreement with the school to alleviate some of those rights, doesn't mean this is a good idea. In the event of a crisis, system failure, a nefarious actor, it opens up so many variables to play with. It's a dumb idea to establish technology like that on campus when the better solution is to just hire more staff and hire better trained staff and engorge curriculum with more engaging lessons.
On top of that, whatever amount of money to establish and upkeep these I promise will eventually fail as kids will figure out some way to bypass it. They always do. Waste of money.
It's an empty platitude because it's a lazy solution. "Just throw money at the problem." I AM a licensed substitute teacher in my state. I'm familiar with the behavior of kids in educational settings.
The citizens of a school district can only support a tax burden so large. And those resources need to be shepherded carefully. And every dollar spent has an opportunity cost. For example, you could pay to station a paraprofessional in every classroom. They could help out on various tasks and also help police student device use. But they themselves will often have their attention drawn away. There's just no practical way to keep continuous eyes on every student. Instead of the kids pulling out their phones when the teacher isn't looking, they'll wait until the paraprofessional is helping one student out and the teacher is writing something on the board. And then you also have to consider opportunity cost. Instead of having classrooms with 30 students with 1 teacher and a paraprofessional, you could could have classrooms with just 20 students.
My solution to this is to build school buildings with Faraday cages built into the walls. It would be expensive to retrofit existing schools this way, but it would be very cheap to do during construction. Schools tend to be renovated every several decades or so, so do it when the opportunity arises. You can line the walls and ceiling with grounded metal grids behind the drywall. Once installed, there is zero ongoing operating cost. You simply make it so cell phones don't work in the building at all. You can still have electronic devices; but the only way to connect will be through a heavily locked down wifi network.
And with this, there is no way past it. This isn't a filter or a jammer (which would itself be illegal.) There's no bypassing the laws of physics. The kids can bring their phones all they want. They simply won't receive a signal inside the school building. If they need to call their parents for a ride at the end of the day, they can walk outside and make the call there.
It's not a lazy solution, it's literally the solution to most things. Nobody said to throw money at it, it has been a common point to fund teachers better. A better society is an educated society.
Not to offend but I don't really take you being a substitute teacher as a professional opinion. I'm a chef, I understand the mass ignorance in my sector. I have friends in IT who lament the mass ignorance in their sector. A professional opinion on these kinds of overarching matters isn't good enough.
Wrapping a school in a faraday cage is a ridiculous solution when funding teachers is a solution that covers multiple issues schools face. And there is a way around it. Kids will find it. You can easily slap one device connected by cable to another outside of the cage and it becomes useless. It's not a solution.