Phones and AirPods are considered personal items to many students. Students use them daily, from texting friends to responding to their guardians. Many students lose their devices throughout the school year and don’t realize it’s gone for a few hours. Before, teachers were assigned to help find your lost cell phone because no one else would help; now, no one is assigned. Teachers used to scramble all over, using valuable class time to look for students’ lost items. Most of these incidents came to a dead end. Protecting student items wasn’t worth the time they had wasted looking for lost items.

During school, phones go off all of the time. Students are so addicted to their cell phones many take them out during class time and get them taken away. When students are on their phones in class, it interferes with their learning. This is one of the reasons they put the new phone policy in place – If students are irresponsible with their devices, it puts added stress on teachers to micro-manage.

It’s unfair for staff or teachers to put their own time on the line. It could take hours to look through video footage to find something, let alone ask students about lost items. If your stuff is stolen, you should first identify who you were with and what you did that day. After going over all the specifics and most of the clues, you can involve staff only if you have a 100% guarantee about where your items are and just need to retrieve them. This could help staff as they would not have to do as much work and spend as much time looking into students’ belongings. Students could also have a higher chance of finding lost items, and it wouldn’t be a big ordeal.

The reason the administration put this policy in place is because of how time-consuming and wasteful the school’s resources searching for lost items can be. They probably have many dead ends when it comes to investigating students’ lost items. When students lose their items, it can become taxing to everyone involved. Students should be fully responsible for their items. It takes the burden away from staff wasting valuable time and only wastes the student’s time.

Overall, students need to take more responsibility for their items. The school is teaching a valuable lesson about not losing items and not depending on others for what they’ve done. This could keep students from losing their phones as often and teach them not to make these mistakes in the future. In the future, students need to be more careful and not depend on others to fix their mistakes.