There are over 115,000 schools in the United States. In the 23 years since Columbine there have been 380 school shootings (one is too many, of course).
Any loss of life is tragic but school shootings are a lot like plane crashes: shocking, clustered loss of life. It’s the old story about 150 people dying in a plane crash gripping national (and international) media attention for days while 117 people die in car crashes EVERY DAY and they barely make the local newspaper. Oh yeah phones are a large contributor to these too…
Meanwhile, suicide is the third largest leading cause of death for people aged 15-24 (somewhere around 5,000/yr). Accidents (including cars) are by far the leading cause of death. Not to mention drugs…
School shootings are terrible and any loss of life is tragic. However, the actual statistical chances of a young person being harmed or involved in a school shooting are tiny.
I have a friend who is a high school principal and as the article describes, far more young people are harmed (up to and including suicide) by phones than guns. The sexting, constant and relentless bullying, distraction, overall device addiction, etc does far more damage to far more kids than guns (as wild as that might seem).
Thousands of adults at a time, with far more responsibility (many of whom are parents), will surrender their phones in magnetic pouches to see Dave Chapelle (as one example). Tragedy doesn’t strike when they don’t have constant and immediate access to their phones. It’s actually not the difference between life and death.
Meanwhile, asking 14 year olds (many of whom have no responsibilities other than school) to not have their phones in an environment allegedly dedicated to focus and learning for a few hours at a time receives pushback. It’s truly bizarre.
And mental health issues resulting from the soul-crushing school system itself. From boredom in the classroom, and from grading and testing of students. It's a prison environment that children are compelled to attend.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Perhaps kids would be better socialized, and thus wouldn't become school shooters, if they got off their phones. Just a thought.
Just an entirely bogus thought. Neatly allowing all of the blame to rest on the shooters not the rest of the toxic social culture around them. Sure, that society didn't 'pull the trigger' but they damned well sure primed the kids toward those crimes.
School shootings are not like plane crashes, they are like plane hijackings by suicidal terrorists. (Because that's what they are.)
There are now kids who have loved through two school shootings. You're downplaying this significantly. Find a way to keep guns out of the hands of domestic terrorists and I'll listen to your concerns about phones but not before.
> I have a friend who is a high school principal and as the article describes, far more young people are harmed (up to and including suicide) by phones than guns. The sexting, constant and relentless bullying, distraction, overall device addiction, etc does far more damage to far more kids than guns (as wild as that might seem).
Or perhaps it's the "thousands of adults" seeing Dave Chappelle? The parent had no "math," only talking points. But here's some actual data:
46 school shootings in 2022
27 school shootings in 2023, as of May 5
There are approximately 93000 pre college public schools in this country. All but one school shooting has been at public schools. That means the likely hood of going to a school where a shooting will happen (using the 2022 numbers) is ~0.04%. Ask any parent if a "one in a 2500 chance" that their kid will be at school during a shooting makes them feel good or bad.
Is that good enough math for you? Let the kids keep their phones. In the not-actually-unlikely-event that there is a school shooting, more phones is better. Make schools, which are mandatory (not like airplane rides) safer and we can talk about phones. Focusing on less important issues, backed by anecdata (my school principal friend says... blah blah blah) is a waste of energy that could be used elsewhere.
Say 500 kids in the school have phones. 250 of them call 911. The vast majority of emergency call centers have zero chance to deal with that volume. So all the emergency responders are caught up on the lines sifting through children while the adults with the most useful information are stuck on hold.
Let's say the same number of kids call their parents, either before or after they try 911. 100 of those parents drive directly to the school in 100 different vehicles, coming from both directions on what is probably a two-lane road. Now the crime scene with police needing to get in, ambulances needing to get out, etc. is completely congested with terrible traffic that slows everyone down, and police officers who should be focused on dealing with the shooter and saving kids are instead focused on crowd control.
Meanwhile, within the school, teachers and other staff are trying to manage the situation. They need children to be paying absolute attention to them and following their instructions immediately. But instead, half their kids are on the phones obsessively tracking news and social media or sobbing to their parents.
A teacher in every classroom means you have a phone in every classroom, plus in the offices, plus on staff moving through the hallways. That's more than enough phones.
I can appreciate this. I can also appreciate your decision to disagree. One could argue that there are improvements to be had in our emergency call centers but having lived in both urban and rural environments, I feel confident that emergency services know how to get around most traffic problems. (Sometimes they'll just invent a hole.)
I'm not, not going to enable my kid to get a hold of me in an emergency. There's just no chance of that. I don't trust that the schools have this under control and (anecdata time!) the teachers I know don't really feel it either. Show me progress on school safety. Prove we're doing more than just theater. Then we (the royal "we," not you and I) can have a healthy discussion about use of electronics in a school environment. I don't _want_ my kid to have a phone at school, I just don't _trust_ that we're doing everything we can to ensure physical safety.
> Ask any parent if a "one in a thousand chance" that their kid will be at school during a shooting makes them feel good or bad.
Of course school shootings make parents feel bad.
Having phones doesn’t improve the 1:1000 odds of my child being in a school shooting.
Ask parents if they’d like to have improved mental health and school performance. It’s the choice between phones not improving outcomes in a 1:1000 chance vs phones substantially harming kids at a much higher probability.
Phones are a poor intervention to ameliorate school shootings.
I corrected my math. It's 93000 schools. One in 2500 kids will be at school during a shooting. That's 2500-${dead} that will likely suffer from PTSD. Know what people with PTSD often do? Hint: rhymes with suicide.
Phones in schools help in active shooter situations. They help responders know what's going on. They let children call their parents.
The article has links to unrelated studies and draws correlation without evidence to the author's conclusions. We have actual evidence that children have called their parents and that phones in hands have helped officers understand how things are playing out. This article and the personal accounts both here and there are unconvincing. Sure, social media is trash but I'm happy to deal with that on a personal level with my kid. There's nothing I can do to improve their safety at school though and that is something that school should be responsible for.
And how does that weigh toward the benefits of not having phones in schools? Or compared to having non-smart phones that can only call parents or 911?
I’m glad you’re privileged enough to “deal” with social media with your kids. Monitoring whether I’m dealing with it is really hard, so I’m glad you’ve figured it out. But there are many other parents and kids without your privilege that are suffering from phones.
Allowing phones to add some unquantified benefit during a school shooting rate event they will not impact 999:1000 kids seems like a selfish decision to justify how I want to raise my kids not thinking about everyone else.
Kids with phones get the same PTSD during a school shooting as kids without phones.
PTSD accounts for .6% of suicides in men and 3.5% of suicides in women [0]. I can’t find exactly comparable rates for social media, but studies show it has a 3x multiplier in depression for kids [1] and the increase in suicide that brings.
No need to rhyme.
So if our goal is reducing suicide, I think allowing phones to mitigate some small, unknown fraction of PTSD from a 1:1000 chance school shooting is not wise.
I think adults are also misusing phones and quite addicted and suffering from harm and we project our decisions onto kids. But I think we should work to protect kids from our mistakes.
We shouldnt try to justify kids smirking because we smoke. But it seems like we’re smoking away and saying that it’s ok that kids smoke too because of the spurious benefits of smoking. Like the old ad that said smoking was beneficial to moms because the low fetus weight at birth made vaginal birth easier. (This ended up being a fake photoshop [2])
But bringing up how kids can livestream their school shooting to reduce PTSD seems like such a similarly farcical reach when the complaint is that kids are misusing phones and suffering increased rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide.
And another point - how may of those school shootings ended before anyone the student called could do anything whatsoever to impact the situation? You are using 1 in 2500 based on counting all school shootings, but some 98% of those are over in seconds or at most a couple minutes.
From what I can tell, there's only been ~10 school shootings in history that involved "active shooter wandering the halls from class to class shooting large numbers of children." One every couple years in modern times. Far more often, either the shooter only had one target from the beginning, or only stays in one classroom, or is stopped right away. Extreme events like Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Columbine are burned into our collective memories, but only about half-a-dozen other incidents fit that mold in K-12 schools.
My post was a mix of math and an anecdote about phone usage in schools because, like many HN readers (I suspect yourself included), I wouldn't otherwise have any understanding of just how detrimental and dangerous phones are to the "average" student. Here's more detail on one example to try to understand what phones are doing to kids. His high school has roughly 1,000 students. At least once a week they deal with some catastrophic, potentially life changing issue related to phone usage. My school principal friend says "blah blah blah":
He walked in his office one day and a police officer, school staff, and a district attorney were in the conference room with multiple phones on the table with strategically placed Post-It notes on the screens. Again, he deals with this on a weekly basis so he knew immediately what was going on...
Turns out a student wanted to take revenge on another student who "stole her boyfriend" or something. She obtained a nude photo of the target student and posted it across all of her social media accounts - including Facebook where she was "friends" (for some reason) with at least two known adult sex offenders.
The district attorney and police had to explain to her that she could be looking at thousands of counts of disseminating child pornography. Obviously this is a scare tactic but imagine the trauma to all students involved. Meanwhile, he routinely says "these kids swap nude photos like baseball cards" so at the exact moment he's dealing with the student, police, etc this child pornography is flying through the phones of the student body - in school. Imagine the bullying as a result...
Then there's the time a student e-mailed a pornographic video (with children) of another rival to his official school e-mail account, again to settle some kind of score. It goes on, and on, and on. This is one average school in a small midwestern town with 1,000 students. There's no way reason to think these experiences are in any way out of the norm. However, due to the sensitivity these situations obviously aren't communicated in mass media and needless to say your kids aren't telling you about the naked pictures of a classmate they've been sending around all day.
Ask one of the parents who deal with this situation (every week, at one school) how concerned they are about school shootings in that moment.
Additionally, if a parent has a problem with a 1:2500 chance of a student even being exposed to a school shooting, ask questions like:
- How many miles do you drive? Do your kids have a driver's license? Do their friends? How many miles do they drive? What are the safety features of every car they've ever been in?
- Do you have a swimming pool? Do any of your kids friends have a swimming pool?
- Do you personally have guns? How many of your kids friends parents have guns? What do your kids know about guns? Have you talked to all of your kids friends parents about potential ready access to guns?
- What's your healthcare situation? Do you have ready access to mental health resources? How involved are you in the lives of your children? Are you capable of recognizing the (often very subtle) warning signs of depression, self-harm, eating disorders, etc? Same for drug use.
- What social media apps are your kids using? How many accounts do they have? Do they know who all of these people are? Are they friends with any adults (and from my anecdote - any child sexual predators)?
All of these things and many more are a significantly more likely threat to the health, safety, and wellbeing of any child and I would hope that when educated, and when able to look at things rationally, parents would move the issue of school shootings further down their list of concerns for their child where it belongs. I, personally, remember several classmates dying from these causes in high school twenty years ago. Given the numbers, you likely do too.
Children (and people generally) cannot be kept in a hermetically sealed bubble. The fact is we all take actions daily that have significantly higher risks of death and injury. Driving at 70 MPH puts you a split-second away from death or debilitating injury at any moment, yet parents think nothing of traveling thousands of miles on roads with their children every year. Not directly supervising a child near any water can kill them within a few minutes. Your child can go from happy and healthy to dead from suicide or drug overdose in a moment.
If you want to do math on all of these and more you will find that you have a very poor position regarding the actual risks of school shootings, not to mention the base premise (as other commenters have noted) that phones are actually a negative in school shooting scenarios and likely actually contribute to them occurring in the first place.
Here are some quotes from better experts than myself backing up the same line of thinking:
"School leaders at Ashland Middle School in southern Oregon—which has a no cellphones during the school day policy—have worked with local law enforcement on an emergency plan.
"Police officers 'really encourage us to make sure that our students know that if there was some sort of catastrophic event, we would need people to stay off their cellphones,' said Katherine Holden, the associate principal. 'They don’t want us thinking that our students should be calling or trying to communicate with their parents at that moment. They really want students to be listening to adults and following directions, and to be very present.'
"Ashland Middle’s approach generally seems to be right one, said Shawna White, the senior lead for school safety at WestEd, a nonprofit research and consulting organization that works on education and other issues.
“'The use of cellphones on the part of students has more potential to be disruptive to the crisis-response team than it does to benefit' them, she said. Sending text messages can be a big distraction when students need to be paying close attention to adults and following a safety plan.
"And if students are hiding from an active shooter, the dinging of a text message or ringing of a phone might give away their location, she added.
"While kids may want to use their phones to reassure parents that they are OK, their calls may spur their families to clog up law enforcement phone lines, or drive to the school to pick up their child, potentially putting themselves in harm’s way or creating a traffic jam that could interfere with police efforts."
"Ken Trump, the security expert, says phones can actually make us less safe in a crisis such as the one in Parkland. He ticks off several reasons:
"1. Using phones can distract people from the actions they need to be taking in the moment, such as running, hiding and listening to directions from first responders.
"2. The sound of the phone, whether ringing or on vibrate, could alert an assailant to a hiding place.
"3. The shooter could be monitoring the event themselves on social media and find more victims or elude capture that way.
"4. Victims and worried family members trying to get through can jam communications, interfering with first responders.
"'Without a doubt, the cellphones provide an emotional security blanket for parents and kids,' Trump says. As a father himself, 'I get that, my heart is there.'
"And he acknowledges that in some cases, in the hands of responsible parties, phones might help keep people safe. That same Education Week story found that while in lockdown, a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Jim Gard, coordinated with other teachers over email and asked his students to text classmates to make sure people were accounted for.
"Nevertheless, says Trump, the weight of the evidence is against having free access to phones in a crisis. 'I'm in a rare position professionally where I understand the downsides of it.'"
"'We had active shooter training at the end of this last school year and we had that in place, and that was the number one thing that we saw, was students pulling out cellphones and videoing the situation,' Culver said.
"Culver said the students are not going to be engaged with what is going on if they are wrapped up in their phones."
"Former Tulsa Police SWAT Team member Greg Douglass warns they can be detrimental in active shooter situations.
"'Someone is standing right there and could be giving aid,' Douglass said. "It's like, 'Why don't you put down your phone and help?' Or you are literally in the middle of this and you are being victimized. You need to put down your phone to save yourself."
"Douglass said even if the students are not recording, it is absolutely necessary to pay attention. He said calling 911 is not always the best option when there is someone with a gun at your school.
"'Stop relying on police to save you when your life is on the line,' Douglass said. 'You have to do it yourself. You have to take those immediate steps in those first few seconds to save your own life.'
"He said it can take the police several minutes to arrive and most criminal acts happen in seconds.
"Culver agreed that the students need to put down the phones and pay attention to their teacher's plan."
"As far as videoing what is going on, Taylor wonders why that is people's first instinct.
"'You could be stopping the situation, but people just pull out their phones,' Taylor said. 'I'm like, 'this could have been stopped a long time ago.'
"Taylor said the videos usually make it on the internet and make things worse.
"Douglass cautions against posting online or streaming when something like this is happening. The suspect could be watching and getting clues.
"'It literally could give away our positions and actions and things we were doing on the outside,' Douglass warned.
So many arguments against every child having a cell phone in an emergency, many more than I thought of.
I explain it due to attention deficit due to constant phone use.
I find that when I have high screen time I struggle to maintain attention and develop cogent, supported arguments.
When I’m spending infinite time watching 10 second video clips over and over until I sleep, I both 1) am greatly incentivized to not want to change this and 2) would rather quip out an immediate thought than respond with evidence.
Or, more scarily, schools suck too hard now that someone things an individual getting struck by lightening twice is more important than the data and statistical evidence showing the danger of lightening strikes.
By the portal opened by those phones to unhealthy dark places, connections created through the phones to destructive influences and influencers, by the fact that phones are social pressure magnifiers. Yes, it is nearly certain that more lives have been destroyed by those than have been by weaponry.
> However, the actual statistical chances of a young person being harmed or involved in a school shooting are tiny.
That's what a lot people said about COVID but my family still wore masks and got the vaccine. I'm not going to send them to school in kevlar vests but I want them to have access to high precision GPS, bluetooth, hd video and a high speed data connection during a crisis.
How about "get fully capable smart phones out of schools now"? This safety argument could still be fulfilled with a cheap, simple phone that allows the student to text / call 9-1-1 and a handful of trusted contacts.
No, I want my children to have access to high precision GPS, bluetooth, hd video and a high speed data connection during a crisis. I'm not worried whether or not the cops will be called. I simply refuse to wait outside for a hour with them while a crazy person shoots up classrooms one by one.
That's our plan. A simple device that allows for emergency use. Call mom, dad, trusted friend, 911. But our kid is young and limits are hard. As they age up, this will evolve.
Or just put voip phones in every classroom for emergencies and ban mobile phones for students. 99.99999% of teachers have a cell phone anyway in the event of a proper emergency.
> But would a school where every student has a smartphone be safer than one in which only the adults have smartphones? Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, warns that using a cellphone during an emergency can increase safety risks. “During a lockdown, students should be listening to the adults in the school who are giving life-saving instructions,” Trump explains. “Phones can distract from that. Silence can also be key, so you also don’t want that phone noise attracting attention.” In addition, it seems to me that 300 parents rushing to the school in 300 cars would probably make things more difficult for first responders.
I would add that if Haidt is correct that removing phones improves mental health, then the likelihood of school shootings might decrease as a result. In any case, if you're going to argue with the headline, you might as well respond to the relevant portion of the article.
The teacher has a cell phone. Even if the teacher doesn't have a cell phone, there's yet another system in place: a telephone on the teacher's desk.
The article already talks about why the "what if" argument doesn't work. Uncoordinated responses triggered by direct child-to-parent interaction are inefficient and counterproductive to a coordinated response.
> The teacher has a cell phone. Even if the teacher doesn't have a cell phone, there's yet another system in place: a telephone on the teacher's desk.
The teacher is going to call the cops and then what? We get to watch the cops wait outside for a hour while kids are being murdered[1] ? If you wanna depend on the cops to save your child that is your business but you don't get to make that choice for me.
You're not completely wrong but you're heading that way. Almost every public and private school in the country does shooter drills now. Kids who haven't been through a school shooting suffer PTSD. They are genuinely afraid that they'll die at school and this is a reality they hear from many adults.
What you mean to say is that not 100% of kids will suffer through a school shooting and that's true but I'll be damned if going to opt to remove phones from kids at school until the likelihood inverts, year over year.
As the article notes, believing that they need their phone to hedge against that possibility and won't be safe without it likely makes their mental health worse, not better.
> Statistically, a cell phone will do more harm to a child than a gun (comparing injury and death as a rate of gun ownership vs depression rates for kids with smartphones).
To even suggest a child owning a gun is safer than a smart phone is in incredibly poor taste and a smack in the face of any parent who has lost a child to this crisis.
Scroll up to see my reply above - law enforcement and security experts tend to say that children using their phones causing more harm than good during a crisis.
