It now appears almost certain that the state will pass a bell-to-bell phone ban soon. What plans are being made for a phone ban at Algonquin, and what can students expect?
“I feel very strongly, and I’ll say this to anybody who listens, that teenagers have been victimized by how phones are designed and how social media is designed to keep them attentive and to build algorithms. We are trying to come up with a plan that is reasonable, affordable and sustainable. We are looking at a few different products. [Yondr pouches are] a very difficult product to pull off in a building our size with multiple entrances and teenage independent thinking. There’s some app-based solutions that are out there that we were looking at closely. There’s a product called Doorman that we are looking at really closely. [Doorman] delivers a lot of features that are attractive.”
How will the school enforce the new regulations if passed?
“[Phones] do present this major distraction challenge in our school, and yet, they’re so convenient to have, and they provide such a sense of safety. Eliminating them entirely, while it would be good for teaching and learning, is also really hard to pull off. Families support the idea that they want their child to be learning and that cell phones compete with students’ attention, but they also want to be able to get in touch with their child, in case of an emergency, or arrange a drop off or a pickup for a practice at the end of the day.”
This June will see the retirement of many teachers. Will these vacated positions be filled for the next school year, and what has been the overall impact of this year’s budget cuts?
“The answer about whether or not they’ll be filled depends on the department. There are places in the building, for example, in math, where we have an individual who’s retiring, and we’ve hired somebody to replace that person because the class sizes were already high enough that losing five sections of teaching and not replacing them was not viable. In other parts of the building, it was more possible to absorb the retirement and not fill in for that person. We have multiple retirements in the Applied Arts department in particular.”
If positions are not filled, how will this impact student experience and class sizes? If positions are being filled, how does administration work to counteract the knowledge and history being lost?
“It’s never a one-to-one trade-off. If you’re losing decades of teaching, there’s definitely a sense of loss there, but sometimes you bring on somebody who has new ideas. Next year, we’ll have quite a different complexion of the [Applied Arts] department with at least one new member, and also lots of different enrollment trends. I think this department, their program and its staffing specifically will look quite different.”
Overall, what have been the successes of the past school year, and what are you looking forward to accomplishing?
“I think this year had the potential of being really disruptive because we were examining the Program of Studies so closely and making some shifts to the graduation requirements we’ve had for decades. I think we’ve raised the bar for academic rigor, and it may have been a challenging year to push people to make those demands, but I feel strongly that we’re going to be better off for it.”
“We also have teachers who are trying a lot of new and exciting methods that you’re probably seeing, not in big sweeping ways, but in more subtle ways that are probably making your learning a little bit more engaging than those lessons were previously taught. Finally, our career readiness work continues to progress. We had students in the police department, students in our business office and students in other businesses around central Massachusetts, learning new skills and getting a lot of experience. That’s been really exciting to see.”
Is there anything else you would like to add?
“I think it’s been an excellent year. I will give the Algonquin staff a big shout-out. We had a year where we made a lot of major shifts, and there were shifts not every staff member was asking to have happen. But they rose to the challenge with new standards that I am confident are best for students.”
