BY SARAH BOESVELD, THE GLOBE AND MAIL 

 

The pocket-text. The below-the-chair button punch. The high-pitched ring tone that no one over 30 can hear.

If you want to know how to use your banned cellphone in class, just ask Grade 11 student Robbie MacIntyre.

"Getting a call in class, you sometimes just put it in your sleeve or, like, if everyone's milling around, you can kind of just get away with it. Teachers don't even see it," says the 16-year-old, who attends North Toronto Collegiate Institute.

In Canadian schools where cellphones are verboten, students are still sending upward of 50 texts a day. Out of frustration, some school administrators are also going stealth as they try to enforce the rules.

Last Thursday, 90 students at Port Hardy Secondary School on Vancouver Island boycotted class after they learned that principal Steve Gray was trying to block cellphone service by using a jammer, a tin box with antennae that acts as a signal repellent.After doing some online research, the students discovered the device is outlawed under Sections 4 and 9 of Canada's Radiocommunication Act. The school had banned electronic devices from its classrooms since September, 2007, but iPods and cellphones kept streaming in, the principal told The Globe and Mail.

The students' defence? It's their right to use a cellphone at school. "I just think it's our right to be able to have [our] own personal stuff," says boycott organizer Destiny Herman, a Grade 12 student. She says that if teachers are allowed to have cellphones with them, students should too.

The rights issue was first raised during a controversial effort in 2007 to ban cellphone use in Toronto high schools. Even parents were outraged that the school board would "take away their right" to phone their kids at school.

"The bottom line is being able to use your cellphone in class is not in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," says Josh Matlow, the Toronto District School Board trustee who successfully saw through the ban in April, 2007.

While he admits there are challenges to enforcing the ban, he doesn't think teachers should try to up the ante on students who defy it.

In Toronto classrooms, students can bring a cellphone but it must be turned off. Other schools and boards across the country have also forbidden cellphones, including the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board in Southern Ontario, the Halifax Regional School Board and Northern Ontario's Algoma District School Board as well as individual schools in Ottawa, Gatineau, Montreal and the Niagara region. The rules can vary from school to school, and enforcement also varies from teacher to teacher, students say. Some only have a problem if it's distracting others.

Hanna Blakeley, a Grade 9 student at Toronto's Jarvis Collegiate, says her English teacher completely ignores one female classmate who chats away during class on her Bluetooth headset.

It's rare for a teacher to do anything more than reprimand a student for using a cellphone in class, or confiscate it, both educators and students say.

A clear and proper procedure, such as the one written out on a poster and tacked on classroom walls in North Toronto Collegiate Institute, lessens the chance of a teacher upping the ante, says principal Joel Gorenkoff.

Teachers are required to first give a warning to the student, then confiscate the phone. It's taken to the principal's office, where parents must pick it up.

"I've asked teachers not to get into arguing with the student in the hall or taking the phone themselves," Mr. Gorenkoff says. So far, the system is a pretty good deterrent.

And what does he think of his students using adult-resistant ring tones? "Well, it makes me feel bad to be older." he says. "But it's a visibility thing. Even if it goes off, if it becomes visible then the teachers are dealing with it."

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Cellphone jammer

A Cellphone communicates with its service network via a cell tower. Cell towers divide the landscape into small areas, or cells.

A phone jammer simply transmits on the same radio frequency as the cellphone, disrupting the communication between it and the cell tower.

NINIAN CARTER/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

SOURCE: HOWSTUFFWORKS.COM

 

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