Cell Phones in School Emergencies

[Dr. Abe Flannigan]: The presence of phones in schools does not contribute to student physical safety and in some ways can make it worse. And so I’m going to outline four points. The first is that if students are attending to their phones during an emergency, they might miss important instructions that are given to them by, you know, the teachers, administrators, whoever is around and in charge of keeping them safe. The noise from the phones can alert shooters to where the people are hiding. So, your son or daughter might be huddled in a closet or behind a desk and if a shooter walks by and hears the phone vibrate, for instance, then that’s going to alert them to their presence. Too many people trying to call or text in the same location can use up bandwidth, make it difficult for authorities to communicate. And this last one was actually something that – a problem that we had at the high school shooting in Windsor, Georgia, that when students get to their phones and tell their parents that an emergency situation is happening, well, parents hop in their cars and try to get to the school. That can lead to traffic congestion and make it difficult for police, ambulances, other first responders to get on scene and help. And so that’s something that actually happened here in the state of Georgia. And so, in that testimony, the kind of point was made that phones haven’t actually been shown to increase student physical safety, especially in those kinds of emergencies. And so these arguments are more about trying to provide caregivers with a sense of security and safety, when that sense of security and safety can actually be given by something that can make the situation more dangerous for their students.