SP school adopts fanny pack that locks students’ cell phones – 02/15/2024 – Education

This year, a private school in São Paulo adopted, as teaching material, a fanny pack that locks students’ cell phones at the beginning of the first class and only releases it at the end of the last. The system is similar to that of anti-theft tags, which have a magnetic lock and can only be removed from clothes and other products by a device at the checkout. In the case of the school, it is the teacher or an employee who has the device to demagnetize the lock, opening it and releasing the cell phone.

The fanny pack is yet another tool that appears amid the anti-cell phone movement in schools, which is growing in Brazil and other countries, in an attempt to contain the damage caused by excessive use of the device to the learning and mental health of children and young people.

The new development will begin next Monday (19) at the Alef Peretz school, located inside the Jewish club A Hebraica, in Jardim Paulistano, in the west of the capital.

Afterwards, it will be introduced into the unit that the school maintains for one hundred high school students in the community of Paraisópolis, in the south of the capital.

The small bag was developed by Yondr, an American company founded in 2014 in the wake of the “phone-free” movement, which is gaining strength in the USA. The idea of ​​this movement is not to ban the device completely, but to create areas and moments in which it is not used, in search of a complete presence of the public, without distractions and with in-person social interaction.

In addition to being adopted at shows and events that begin to offer “phone-free zones”, Yondr’s fanny pack is already present, according to the company, in more than 3,000 schools, 2,000 of which are in the USA and the rest in countries in Europe.

In the United States, parents, educators and even students launched the Cell-Free Schools Movement whose mission, according to its website, is to ensure that all children and young people can develop their academic and socio-emotional skills “without the distractions, pressures and harm of cell phones and social networks during school time”.

Restricting and even banning the device in schools was strongly recommended in a report last year by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which pointed out a relationship between the use of technology and difficulties in children’s learning, among other losses.

In Brazil, Alef Peretz is the first school to adopt the Yondr fanny pack, says relationship director Lina Brochmann, who learned about this system in a report last year in Piauí magazine and started the debate with the school community. “We had strong support from families,” she says. “After the pandemic, parents became very distressed because they can no longer control their children’s access to their cell phones. There are cases of children using their cell phones for up to 16 hours a day.”

The school imported the bags and passed on the cost to families, of around R$170 per student (the school’s monthly fee is, on average, R$5,000). Cell phones will not even be allowed at recess. “This will be one of the biggest challenges for us,” says Brochmann.

“At recess, students can move around the entire club, and it’s a large area,” he explains. “We are preparing to deal with withdrawal from both students and families, who have become accustomed to communicating with children during school hours.”

On the other hand, the school hopes, according to Brochmann, that “students will start to make the most of recess time to play sports, play, talk or even do nothing, to rest, which is also so important.”

In the case of the Paraisópolis unit, which is free and aimed at young people in the community, the fanny pack will be paid for by the school itself.

President of Alef Peretz, Marcelo Davidovici says that the option to ban the device has to do with the problems with focus, attention and even memory that have been observed in students in recent years. “Another serious issue is what algorithms bring to the sociability of children and young people,” he says. “They cause them to have relationship problems because they reinforce what each other thinks and, ultimately, strengthen the idea that they can only have a relationship with themselves.”

The decision to lock the cell phone with the fanny pack – and not just create a rule that prohibits the student from using it – is a way of circumventing the addiction that the devices have created. “We all feel a compulsion to look at our cell phones and see if there are new messages, anything new on social media,” she says.

At Alef Peretz, at least for now, the fanny packs will be stored in students’ backpacks. In some schools, the option is to leave them all together in a box in the classroom.

Davidovici denies that banning cell phones is contradictory to media education, that is, the school’s role in educating students in the conscious use of technology – this argument is often used by schools that prefer not to ban cell phones.

“Controlling cell phone use and raising awareness about all these issues need to happen simultaneously,” he says.

Media education, according to him, is present in the school’s curriculum. “Even when use is contained at school, children and young people will continue to have access outside the school environment and need to learn how to deal with this technology,” he says. “What we want is for them to be able to use cell phones and other technologies in a beneficial and non-harmful way.”