Amy Rock (00:00): Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's podcast, which we'll discuss cell phone bans in K to 12 schools, and also cell phone connectivity. My name is Amy Rock, I'm Campus Safety's executive editor, and joining me today is Stephen Kowal, CCO of connectivity. And now as you know, obviously Stephen, this topic has gained a lot of traction and interest over the last several months, and especially in the last couple of weeks now that schools are back in session. And I think last time I checked, nine states have laws or policies about cell phone usage in K to 12 classrooms. And with most things, there are significantly varying opinions on banning cell phones in classrooms. And we do know that studies have shown that cell phones are a significant distraction in schools. But I'm kind of curious what your general opinion on banning cell phones in schools is.

Stephen Kowal (00:50): Yeah, it is. Like you say, it's a very difficult answer here because sometimes you can look at it from a few different facets. Number one is from a safety perspective, having a cell phone in a classroom would enable you to perhaps during an emergency have better communication with first responders. But when you look at it from a learning side, from the teacher's side, it definitely can be very distracting. And I've seen inside a classroom, some teachers embrace it where they've used connectivity as a way to help them do research and taught them how they were going to use these devices in the real world. And then you have the other side of the opinion where people just think that, Hey, we're going to go back to just the book and we're going to limit connectivity to the outside world. And I don't think that there is just a pure straight up answer. Obviously the business that I'm in, I think cellular connectivity is better for the community at large. But I definitely can see from the educator's perspective, from the first responder's perspective that there's various degrees of response on that.

Amy Rock (01:55): Yeah, I think it also depends on the child too. Obviously some can handle distractions better than others and nothing is a one size fits all approach, which makes it so difficult. And in your personal life, if you're chatting with someone and they're on their phone, you're so annoyed by it. I can't imagine being a teacher with 20, even upwards of 30 kids in a class trying to get them to listen to you. And then it shows up sometimes in test scores depending on the child as well. So a lot of factors.

Stephen Kowal (02:24): Well, I can tell you Amy, I don't even like to go to dinner with my 13-year-old and have the cell phone come out. So I mean, even in my own home life, I recognize the fact that my son can be very distracted if he has that phone in his hand. And even if we think about it, I sometimes ask him to leave it in the car because even if the phone vibrates near him, he becomes distracted. And so what I've actually seen is teachers, some educators today are using very rudimentary ways to deal with this. The school that my son goes to, some of the teachers when you check into the classroom, the shoe holders on the wall and they've got to check their into that shoe holder. So they cannot have it in their physical possession, but it's in the classroom, which means that if they are doing something that requires perhaps some external research, they can go get their phone during that 15 minutes of time, or if there is an emergency, the cellular telephone is in the classroom and they can get it. So I really applaud the teachers that are looking at this from maybe a creative perspective about how to have a happy medium

Amy Rock (03:28): Today. I feel like you're largely hearing about the lock pouches that they use for phones, and I kind of like the idea of, like you said, just putting it in a shoe thing and the kids can access it if they truly have to. Obviously, again, there's so many different ways to approach it, and I think it depends on a lot of factors, but what do you think are some other perhaps unexpected dangers or issues that could come with banning cell phones that administrators or school districts might not think of? People are automatically thinking of worst case scenario school shooting, but there's other emergencies obviously that are far more likely to happen, but what are some maybe unexpected dangers of banning phones?

Stephen Kowal (04:08): Yeah, so I mean the ones that we think about, you've said it, if there was a mass emergency inside of the school, parents would want to have direct connectivity with their children to make sure that they're okay. We would perhaps want to be able to call 9 1 1. But we also think about things like medical emergencies. It's not always that the parents have kept their contact information up to date inside the logs for the school, but I guarantee that that child's phone has the emergency contact of their parents inside of it. So if you had a medical emergency for the child and you needed to call out, you don't even need to know passwords anymore. You can just put it right up to their face and you can say, call mom, call dad, and it's going to dial out as you look further into this. Children, if something happened to the teacher during a medical emergency, want to be able to call out, and I know that they could run into the hall and get another teacher, but I think medical emergencies aren't an area that we should be looking at here. Also because the phone contact is probably the best set of contacts that a child has.

Amy Rock (05:18): Absolutely. And now let's say a school or a classroom doesn't ban cell phones and allows their students to have them on 'em. We do know that there are a lot of dead zones inside a school, so if a kid does want to use it for an emergency, a lot of them can't kind of renders cell phones useless in many cases anyways. Why is this the case and how can schools improve connectivity, especially the older ones?

Stephen Kowal (05:40): So I'm a huge advocate around this area because I think what people don't realize is there's two types of connectivity inside of a school. And actually I'm going to state there's three types of connectivity inside of a school. The first and probably most important is cellular connectivity. So the way that they've built buildings, and especially schools you think about, there's not a lot of windows they're made with, we'll call it materials to last a very long time. We're not building new schools all the time. These are all things that impact cellular coverage. These are large volumous areas, big halls, lots of classrooms. And so schools that are getting built today, the new ones are thinking about cellular connectivity inside of the building, but the older schools have to retrofit and sometimes that can be very expensive for them. And so you got to balance the need for cellular connectivity versus the expense for cellular connectivity.

So that's one type of connectivity that we need to think about. The second type of connectivity is for first responders. When a first responder gets to a site during an emergency, it's very important that the radios that they use are going to work when they go into the school. So those are not cellular, they're traditional seven or 800 megahertz radios. It's called public safety systems or ERCS systems. A lot of municipalities throughout the United States today are making schools go back and retrofit those because if there is an event at a school, you've got to have connectivity for your police officers. And then the third type that not many schools are thinking about today, but I think we'll think about in the future is private cellular. So if you think of things like the Apple Vision Pro, those goggles that they've just come out with, I believe schools are going to begin to implement those for learning.

You don't just talk about the Great Wall of China, you can put the virtual goggles on and you can be on the Great Wall of China and kids can be immersed into this learning. I think that's the next way we look at it. If you think about the way kids are playing games today, VR is a big deal. This is the way that their minds are being wired to just immerse themselves into the environment. I think learning will go that way and they're not going to want to have public cellular to support those. These devices provide mobility and the wifi network can't handle it. It's a big burden on the IT department, but what you can do is put in a private cellular network for those devices, keep 'em native to cellular, but not allow them to communicate to the outside world. And those are the three things that I think schools need to think about. Public cellular, private cellular and public safety.

Amy Rock (08:16): Well said. And now you touched on this briefly about retrofitting versus newer builds. Are new builds taking these challenges into consideration, implementing something during the building process versus like you said, retrofitting after the fact?

Stephen Kowal (08:30): Well, the unfortunate part is if you put all the priorities inside of a building, the exact same conversation you and I are having right now about where does cellular fall and is it above or below wifi, is it above or below the van traps to have people come into the door and be able to secure the building? Is it above or below IP cameras to watch what's happening? Is it above or below things like vape detection inside of there? So sometimes it gets pushed to the bottom and it'll get value engineered out, which is a real sad point because it's probably about 50% more cost to come put it back in after the building is built. And so I think that things like you are doing right now, guiding a conversation around all aspects of cellular connectivity will allow it to stay in the new build budget, allow it to be in the original CapEx budget for that building, which means that we'll have more schools with more coverage, which will mean more safety, more enablement of learning through the phones, and again, being able to control that inside the classrooms up to the educator.

But I think the building needs to support it, and it should be in the greenfield build site.

Amy Rock (09:42): That made me think of when you're saying IT kind of schools in a way, because their budgets are often limited, have to decide how they're going to prioritize things, which just frankly sucks. Do you know of any avenues or channels of funding that schools can access for this type of project?

Stephen Kowal (10:01): So a lot of times schools use E-Rate money for things like wifi and that's there now, what's really great about some of the solutions out on the market, and this, I don't mean to make this an advertisement, but I'll say a little bit about our solution, our das system or our cellular system, we've just recently announced that it will also do gunshot detection. So if you think about the fact that we have all of these antennas out in the building that already helping support cellular coverage, we put AI and we put microphones in those so that we can detect, we can triangulate where a potential threat has come from. By doing that, it takes the cellular connectivity and it puts it into a new category for funding. So under the infrastructure bill, there's a lot of money available for school safety and fortification. And so the fact that now our system does gunshot detection along with cellular connectivity, it now can get some of that funding and help offset the cost of putting in a cellular system.

Amy Rock (11:03): I guess it's kind of a hard question. Like we were saying, everyone's opinion is different, but if you had to get behind a system or a process of successful ways to limit student's cell phone usage during class, maybe not banning outright but also keeping them safe, what do you think that would look like?

Stephen Kowal (11:19): I really applaud the folks who are just using the most rudimentary way of doing this, right? I mean, like you said earlier, some people are pitching these little dyne cage packages that you put a phone in it and there's no connectivity to it at all. Zero. And I think zero connectivity is not the way to go. I think the way to do this is one, teach children that there is a time and a place to use that cell phone, and there are rules within the classroom and there's rules that involve respect. So when you put your phone into that shoe holder, the rules are you got to put it on silent, right? It's got to be in there. You cannot take it out unless you're permitted to. It's in there during the time that the educator permits. I think that's the way to go. It really is because there then inside the classroom, it allows pretty quick access to it, but allows the teacher to limit the interaction with the phone during the times that they want there to be interaction.

And I think that in schools today from, we're seeing children go to school with phones at like seven, eight, and nine years old. My son was so upset that I didn't let him have it until he was 13, right? He just got that phone and explained to him, I said, there's a lot of rules with this. And as a matter of fact, dam, you're going to laugh at this. My son had to sign a contract to get the phone. And one of the items in that contract is that if a teacher views that it's disruptive and takes it, he loses it for a week. So he doesn't only lose it at school, he is going to lose it at home. He's going to lose in the car, he's going to lose it everywhere. And that is trying to teach my son that when you're in their classroom, it is their rules, right? You must adhere to this social norm that is present in each and every classroom. So I think that very rudimentary put it up in the slot and the shoe holder is really the way to go and then teach them that they have to put it on vibrate and it can't make a noise. And if it makes a noise, you're going to lose it. And I think children are capable of following rules if they understand them clearly.

Amy Rock (13:19): Well, thanks so much for chatting with me. I don't know if there was anything that we didn't go over that you were interested in sharing can just relate to connectivity or tips or any advice you have for schools that might be having issues with it?

Stephen Kowal (13:33): Yeah, what I would say is I think schools, like I said, need to think forward through this. I don't think that cell phone usage has become less pervasive. I think it's going to become more pervasive. And I think that some of the schools that embrace it with things like the Apple Vision Pro, I've recently gone out and talked to schools and they said, oh, we're never going to be able to afford an Apple Vision Pro. It's $3,000. And I said, well, that's funny. If I came to you five years ago and said, did you think you'd be able to afford to have every child have a Google Chromebook? They'd have said, no way in the world am I going to have that money. There will be funding for this. And I think it's number one, the schools that are good at finding the funding that's available that is there, and we can help with that, lots of vendors will help with that.

The second is to make sure that they don't just look at this as cellular only as far as connectivity inside of buildings, right? It is cellular and it is public safety. The first responders have to be able to communicate inside the building and so should the children and the educators. And I think that there are companies out there that are willing to help with that, but don't go it alone and don't let people come in and just at least talk about it. Talking about it is free, and there's many people who will be willing to come out and speak about this, but I appreciate you having me on because I think this is a great topic. I think the topic of cell phones inside of schools is just going to continue to be front of mind, and I was real happy to talk to you about that today. Absolutely.