Episode 214 - More Cell Phone Laws / Memphis vs. PowerSchool / Summer Collections

On this week's episode of the K12 Tech Talk podcast, two states are closer to banning cell phones, but how is a cell phone ban actually enforced at the state level?

Live from the NTP studios, this is the K12 Tech Talk podcast, episode 214. It is important to point out this was the first K-12 technology podcast in the realm, on the Twitterverse, in the podcast world. And here we are. We're still here five years later. Hello, Chris.

Hey, I have a bad microphone today.

Well, I couldn't tell. Thanks for pointing it out.

That's a potato you're using right there?

I'm holding a potato. No. Hey, by the way, exciting though is K-12 Tech Talk.

I can tell it in your voice. It just sounds so excited.

We got a trademark.

We do have a trademark.

Like we are legit.

Yes. So if you're thinking about a podcast with a similar name.

Check yourself.

And Mark's here.

Hi.

Mark, do you have any trademark announcements or? Nope.

I got nothing.

All right. Mark is holding a dog.

I brought my dog tonight.

It's afternoon. noon. I was just going to say, we're probably off our game a little bit because we're recording like six hours earlier than we normally do. But don't worry, none of us are at our real jobs right now. K12 technology, it is the end of the year, guys.

It's only May. It's not the end of the year.

Yeah, for you East Coasters. It's the end of the year. Chris, you're in one of your final weeks. I'm in one of my final weeks.

You have graduation this week?

No, ours is next week.

Chris's is to mine is in hours.

Wow. It's so weird to think of that. It's just so much earlier than, than us in new England.

When's your last day then? How, how long do your seniors get out before your underclassmen?

Um, I think our seniors will get out about a month from now.

What, what my seniors?

Yeah.

What's the question?

Oh, my God. Do you even listen?

Are you also listening on a potato?

How far out do your seniors get out before your underclassmen? Like, when's your last day?

Well, this hit a little different because of all the snow days we had. So just like a couple, like whatever is happening right now, like it's not been anything. So maybe a week.

I was going to say, you did not answer the question. Okay. Yeah, our seniors get out like two or three days. Well, no, I guess it's a week because their seniors last day is tomorrow and kids get out next Friday.

Yeah, I guess it's a week for us. I feel like it's usually a week and a half. Maybe I'm wrong.

All right. It's time for the news. But real quick before the news, Chris, do you want to hit a sponsor before we get?

Yeah, Lightspeed, a proud sponsor of the Potato Headset. They have a new product called Lightspeed Signal. It can help you with your device, your internet, and your app health and give you some good diagnostics to troubleshoot your students when they're at different locations, even at home, that you can troubleshoot that stuff better. I checked that out. It's legit. It's a good product. A light speed signal.

All right. Mark, you want to take it over?

Yeah, let's dive into this one. So Memphis Shelby Public Schools, the largest district in Tennessee, is also the largest district to announce their first lawsuit against PowerSchool. They are one of dozens, if not hundreds, of lawsuits that have been filed against PowerSchool. But Memphis Shelby Public Schools is the largest by far. They actually have paid approximately $21 million to PowerSchool over the last decade. Jeez. So that's a good, sizable contract. They are suing for damages accrued.

Yeah, I was going to ask if the latest event last week was a straw that broke the camel's back. Or, I mean, clearly you just don't file a lawsuit quickly. So, yeah, these were probably all in the works for a while.

So, you know, I was surprised the first class action lawsuit that was filed was like maybe three days after two days after the announcement for PowerSchool. So I think there are some people that just kind of sit around waiting for the next lawsuit. But no, this one was was pretty well thought after.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this take two years to litigate, to get through discovery, to get through all of the extra stuff, jury selection, trial, like two years minimum.

Easily. One, do you think all like a bunch of school districts are going to jump on board and then when it's settled, all schools will get $25 each?

That will be interesting because, you know, with any settlement, if it is decided against PowerSchool, will the settlement be big enough to be meaningful for these districts? And two, will it be sizable enough to kind of push PowerSchool to a brink of some sort? You know, that that's which is worse, you know, pushing your student information system over the edge or getting twenty five dollars in a settlement.

Well, I do think that that regardless of what the outcome is, that there are some great lawyers out there who stand to personally benefit from this.

Oh, yeah. They need a new yacht.

Yeah, no, I don't I don't think school districts and families are really going to see. That's my pessimistic attitude. They're really not going to see much out of this.

That's your Bostonian accent. Yeah, that's right. Attitude.

That's right.

Get out of here.

That was pretty good. It was pretty good.

Park my car in the car park.

Speaking of getting out of here, Congress has said, hey, hotspots, get out of here from E-Rate.

Man, how about that transition? That's right. Oh, man.

Hotspots are one step closer to being removed from the E-Rate program. This was actually relatively new. The fiscal year 2025 was the first one. And I would say something around $20 million, $27.5 million requested for hotspots alone. Well, Congress says, no, we don't like this. And they are proposing there's a bill currently moving through Congress to eliminate this one. It was voted this week right on party lines with Republicans voting this to proceed.

I do have, I do wonder about this. Was it this initiative that kind of opened the door for bus Wi-Fi?

I think so, yeah.

So can you assume that bus Wi-Fi will likely go away with this as well if this goes away?

I think it's very possible. Yeah.

That's one of those things. I think all three of us were pretty suspect of the positive outcomes from bus Wi-Fi being E-rateable. But, I mean, I understand for equity of access, I understand that, you know, but bus Wi-Fi, you know, that could have been left off.

Well, does it connect the dots to Supreme Court E-rate? If this is the thing, the lawsuit with the bus stuff in the hotspots, this is Congress taking action prior to Supreme Court ruling. Now Supreme Court can say, oh, you guys already fixed it.

Oh, no, I don't. I don't know that the Supreme Court would say, oh, you already fixed it.

Well, I do think Chris's point is very valid towards this, because if Congress were to say, hey, I need you to remove this particular aspect of the program. that demonstrates that Congress does have control over the funds.

Sure.

That the FCC is not running wild with the E-Rate program. So, I mean, we could debate whether or not this is right or wrong to remove hotspots, but it does, if Congress does move forward with this, it does show that they have control over the program. And it defeats the opposition's case that the FCC has taken this program and it's an unfair tax and Congress has no control. So that's the positive side of it.

And it's also concerning that if if the Supreme Supreme Court came back and said, no, Congress needs to fix this funding structure for E-rate that. Mr. Cruz is one of the key voices in that process, and it would concern me that if their hand is forced to take action, that it wouldn't be a positive action for E-Rate if Mr. Cruz was in control of that.

We'll see. The student privacy pledge is no longer. So we have fixed student privacy. The student privacy pledge was a voluntary commitment from ed tech providers to protect student data for schools. The organization that runs it has said, well, we have basically fulfilled our pledge and they are sunsetting the student privacy pledge as of the end of April. They have basically kind of pointed to a lot of state legislation has moved forward and is protecting data on a much more rigorous level.

Well, not to be the dissenting voice, but I think this is dumb. States can have laws that require this, right? But unless there's some arm of that or some function of that forcing small school districts to do it, because let's face it, they're the ones that don't have staff to babysit privacy issues. If there aren't vendors taking this voluntary pledge to do this, this is dumb. Whatever.

All right. Well, speaking of state legislation and laws and things that are

Missouri, yes. Missouri's legislature is dumb.

I did go there. And actually, I'm on the side of Missouri here. But anyways, Missouri is set to ban cell phones in schools. At the same time, Maine's legislature was going to do the same, and they've pulled back slightly. So I'll let you guys pivot and do the Missouri overview, because you're probably more familiar with me. Maine, though, had a bill going through that would ban cell phones in schools.

It's a circus. Real quick, I like what Maine has done, because if you're in a state that is big on local control or you prescribed that idea of local control where your local school district knows best how to govern and what rules to make, the Maine method makes sense.

Let's go.

So they're being very prescriptive. And not to read this, but it has to take effect next school year by the start of the 25-26 school year. And it's saying that school districts shall prohibit students from using or displaying these devices, meaning personal communication devices that can display communications, information, images, or data electronically. So we're having this whole conversation of, okay, I assume this means smartwatches too.

Educational purposes.

Yeah, but clearly that wouldn't flow over to lunch or passing time. Yeah, so it has to be in effect by the start of the 25-26 school year. So all of the school boards in Missouri, I know our board meeting is tonight for this month. This will likely be a topic of discussion for a number of school boards in the next, well, month, month and a half. Because Chris, you guys were in that process of approving student handbooks and everything for next school year already.

Yeah. And it's, I, I know that we saw some different sentences with this, like at, at one time, I think a lunch or passing time could be permitted. Yeah. At one time, it didn't so much say educational purposes. I don't think, I think it just more said like a teacher can say it's okay kind of vibe.

Yeah.

So, again, this is the state. The state is telling the schools what what to do. And they pick the most restrictive way to go about it. I even there's some interesting stuff. So I and I think I'm probably one of the last stand schools that does.

It doesn't call out phone or smart smartwatch it it.

Says

The act defines an electronic personal communication device as a portable.

I guess we can we can get into on the educational purposes but again i think it gets really hard to like know that we know that we know that the kid is only using that Mac book for educational purposes.

And not Snapchat or whatever else. Signal. Um... It's going to be interesting. You have strong opinions on both sides. I think everybody can agree that there's too much technology taking place. But you also have that side of the conversation from a parent perspective of, like, Chris, we have a mutual connection. And as somebody we know that yesterday said, I like the idea of being able to text my kid during the day and get a response back. I get it. I can understand that statement.

I never called my mom during the school day. Why do we need to do this now? like it's okay to go a few hours without talking to your parents there's a main office that can take phone calls if there's an emergency like i'm sorry it's a it's a new problem it's a new problem yeah but

New since like early 2000s

Did you have a cell phone in high school mark.

No exactly And I lived. I made it.

We did a lot of things when we were in high school that we lived through that we don't talk about now.

Missouri's thing is the interesting spot, though, too. So it's not being required like, hey, kid, you can't have it on you. Hey, kid, you got to put it in the pouch. Hey, kid, you know, keep it in your car. So there's going to be a lot of temptation and probably discipline issues with this because kids are going to have it in their pockets. They're still going to tell my. So I have a smartwatch and as does my son, he's a junior.

You got to estimate those steps.

Yeah, take off your watch. There's just some interesting stuff that will unfold with that. Where maybe most restrictive should have more exceptions listed in it. That law is saying that we can't do exceptions to.

You know, thinking through it, one of the easy ways around it would be, okay, you got to either leave it at home or put it in your locker. And if you have a smartwatch that is Bluetooth only, then you're severing that connection. You're not getting those notifications quite as often unless you're within range. But if you got a watch with a cell connection in it, you're like, that thing's still working, man.

I think I've looked at a lot of different States approaches to this one. And I think that every single state has said, look, we realize that there's going to be nuances and exceptions and things like that. What we're trying to do at, at a high level is just say that we think that our schools being cell phone free is a better environment for our kids.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah. There's going to be that time where you need to make a phone call because of this or that. No one's policing this. I think that's the important thing. No one's policing this except for the school. And so you're not going to have a situation where a school says, okay, it's okay. You can use your cell phones during the hallways. And all of a sudden the cops show up and say, this is it. We're going to put.

Have you been to Missouri?

No, that's a good point. But I guess my point is like, this is the legislature at the state level saying we're going to do a cell phone free environment for our kids. And then it's up to the schools to figure out the more nuanced details of it. I actually don't think in practice there's a big difference between Maine and Missouri.

No, probably not. The problem will come in when you get, let's say, a district. Let's say Chris's district. I'm not going to volunteer my district for this drama. Chris's district says, OK, we've adopted this rule. But then in practicality, they don't really enforce it. Like you said, Mark, they're allowing them to have them at lunch. Chris's kid is running around with his phone and his smartwatch doing all sorts of damage.

Yeah we actually well let's see i won't say my school i've been at a school district before uh with a policy that literally says uh a whole list of devices and how they're prohibited during the instructional day okay like that it's that restrictive already in place before this missouri law but you can go and look in classrooms and see cell phones out so it's one of those deals where we already had policy in place and we're not following the policy that we have and

That's when you get in trouble if there's an incident or an issue that's where you get yourself in trouble.

I do think it's going to hit different if it's law

Oh sure yeah but I still, are SROs write tickets for it?

I think going back to your original question, Josh, over like, you know, is this going to cause more drama when parents say all that, you know, that you're not enforcing it correctly. The drama that could result from that scenario is way worse than the drama that's already materializing from kids using cell phones all day, every day in school.

Yeah, but that's not going to fix that because social media will still exist outside school.

It will. It will. It reduces the impacts of it, though, and creates a, I think, creates a better learning environment for kids.

Completely agree. Just the fewer distractions, the better. We were on the same page there. Yes.

Yeah.

It's always in the details.

By the way, check out Eaton, and in particular, eaton.com slash paths to power.

No, other way, pathstopower.eaton.com.

Well, that's a redirect, Josh.

The link you sent us in our pre-show meeting was pathstopower.eaton.com.

Anyway, this is so Eaton. They do great battery backups, all kinds of great products, but they also make video games. So in a world where IT pros are the heroes, Pass to Power invites you on a journey like no other. And this is like some kind of adventure game that has some pretty sweet music to it. So anyway, check it out. You can do this during your work day. Check out this website, spend some time on it, and then you can check out all of Eaton's products as well.

I never thought you could take K-12, like IT practices and power racks and PDUs and make it even nerdier than that they've just done with this one. Yes.

This is like Ren Faire meets power distribution.

Find the wizard of light and restore calm to the realm. Will you answer the call?

I'm going to read one of the questions here, word for word. So which tool will grant the Wanderer power over the kingdom and small businesses without ever leaving their desk? Is it a basic rack PDU, a managed rack PDU allowing remote control of individual outlets, the PDU with an L5-30P input cord, or a carrier pigeon?

Ye olde carrier pigeon.

Amazing.

I feel like I feel like that needs more old English language in the in the narrative.

It's true. Hey, I wish they'd ban employee cell phones like that. I'm not allowed to use that.

I was going to bring that up. So what's good for the goose? Is it good for the gander? Like, does this mean teachers shouldn't have cell phones out during the day?

Yeah, it's too. Yeah, that's this is hypocrisy.

I do find it. Go ahead, Mark. I'm sorry.

I was going to say, if we can get the legislature off social media, we might actually get something done,

But not Missouri. Not, and we have the most dysfunctional state legislature. It's unbelievable.

By the way, I'm Missouri, and I don't necessarily agree. Sometimes, hey, listeners, sometimes I stay quiet on here. It's just because I'm letting Josh say his stuff, okay?

I think they...

It doesn't necessarily mean I agree with them.

They've passed three bills this year. I think that's it. But they're completely the same, their own parties, like the same parties argue within each other. It's ridiculous. I do find it interesting. They added a statement in here that absolves employees and volunteers from any liability with disciplinary procedures and any sort of liability with this, which I find interesting.

Yeah.

They're absolving that that liability of thirty thousand dollars worth of phones under a teacher's control.

Yeah.

Which I'm glad they had the foresight to put that that in there. Mark, any other news?

No, that is it. I'll turn it back to you guys.

Chris, this is a topic that you and I brought up because we're in the throes of it. Well, I'm not really in the throes of it. Chromebook collection for summer since it's that time of year. And I think you had said that we do things differently. You don't, your collection looks a little bit different than my collection, right?

I think so, unless we've changed, which I did some new stuff this year. And I don't know, I'll just unpack what we do and then you compare, I guess, Josh. So at our high school, we call down kids by alphabet and grade level. They get in an assembly line. We have them empty out trash. If they're seniors, they take out their ID card, all that kind of stuff. And then we have a person that inspects. And it's several people, right?

So, clarity's sake, when you say you call them down to your office, to the library, To the.

Library via intercom.

Okay. And this check-in process is done by you and your staff?

By library, library staff, our tech student helpers, and tech department involvement.

Well, what's the time frame?

A couple hours. Typical class size? um let's say 500 in two to three hours okay

Interesting your students get the same device back at next year if they're returning returning student.

Yes and we keep that within the building so like an eighth grader coming over the ninth he gets a he gets what high school devices yeah so middle school same bit but uh librarian had this idea and i didn't necessarily like it because it caused the bottleneck um but she had the eighth graders that are going to be not using their chromebooks again open up devices and remove the profile um as well which i didn't that

You running into a storage or like a.

Like they get slow and whatever but and i was more like hey can't we just have them do that when we issue devices that's not really that big of a deal to me but that was the only difference we did for middle school and then at the elementaries we do collect uh third through fifth at our lower um and we did this last year and this year but at the lower at the lowest elementary we leave so at at our lowest elementary the chromebooks stay in the classrooms uh and we We do like

So you don't allow them to use over summer school?

It gets really limited. It's not as many rooms. That's pretty much me.

Okay. So the first difference, we only send home 6 through 12. We don't send home any younger than that. So all of those lower grade levels are in carts. We'll inventory those with one-to-one plus our help desk inventory system over the summer. So the high school started this. The very first year we went one-to-one take home at the high school, The collection process was brainstormed between me and the librarian and a couple other folks.

Too.

Our middle school did things differently. They did them alphabetically by grade level for a couple of years. That was horribly slow and things got lost in the process. The last two years, they have mirrored the process that our high school has done and it is night and day better.

Did you say how many years have you done the totes stuff? You've always done that?

Since our very first year that we went one-to-one at the high school, The middle school did it differently for the first five, however long it's been, five, six years. But our high school has always done it that way. And it's always been the outcome has been very, very good. Yeah. Because they're able to they're able to collect, you know, like I said, the whole building's population is right at a thousand, just over a thousand kids.

A lot.

Yeah, we have about 1,500 kids come for summer school. It's crazy.

Mark, do you have any memories of what you guys used to do?

Yeah, we, I mean, we... They pivoted after COVID to keep the devices in schools.

I kind of love that thought as well.

Yeah, the devices stayed within the school building. Sorry. We did not physically collect them to central office. We just, yeah, we're too big for that. But they stayed in the school. And then we recommended that schools send home the devices with students who needed it.

I don't think I knew that you pulled one to one back after COVID.

Yeah, we, I mean, we, we allowed it. Well, let me put it this way. We allowed schools to decide the model that worked best for their community.

And for the.

Most part at the elementary schools, that meant pulling back one-to-one, keeping the devices in schools and selectively sending them home. at the middle school level and high school level. That's where they started to continue to do the take-homes. But for the most part, everybody sent the devices back to school or kept the devices in school during the summertime.

Yeah. I still have a hard time seeing elementary, middle, getting advantage from take-home devices. You know, our middle school, every once in a while, they're getting used in the evening for legitimate work. I would say by far, it's the high school that takes place. It just, I don't know. There's a lot of risk being introduced, take home at anything under high school.

Yeah, so our upper elementary, the third, fourth, fifth, they can take them home, but they don't really. So fifth is as the teacher directs, fifth or fourth is as the teacher directs, third would be the principal got involved. So that's really special circumstances. Um, so, but my, my, my daughter, uh, Tinley is a third grader. So she took her Chromebook home once this year. Um, and it was to give a, and it was really cool to experience it.

Well, I would say that those younger kids value that ownership or that responsibility more than middle school kids do. And then again, it flips again once they enter high school. That responsibility comes back again at high school level. That's an interesting study, I think.

And then you get kids like making their Chromebooks smoke and stuff.

Oh, speaking of that, we do have a listener email about the TikTok trend. Chris, I know you were out last week. Do you want to debrief us on your experience with TikTok trends?

Sure. I like TikTok.

Oh, you're a TikTok star.

I dabble in it. And I waste, I have a long day at work and I go home and I sit on the couch and I scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. And I consumed the, the, the, the tick tocks. Um, but, but the, the, the, the trend that hit really hit my school. Um, I think the total count that was investigated and documented probably hit 20. Uh, so say we're 2000 kids, they have 20 kids do it. That's a decent little percentage of population participating. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, kids got devices taken away. They got some disciplinary action applied and some fees as well. We had, I think it was three of 20 with actual damage within the USB port that we had to buy new system boards for. And then, I don't know, 10 plus where there was a fee where we're figuring out the insurance part where it's the USB port itself. That needs to get covered. So, I mean, real hardware damages. And it was a real, I mean, kids were doing what their classmates were doing.

Yeah. And what they saw on the internet.

Insane. It's been quite the finish to the school year.

Since you are on TikTok, did those videos make it into your feed?

No, I had seen one prior to it hitting our school. and and the whole way we yeah i wasn't here last time so the whole way it kind of unpacked for us is we had like five six chromebooks with system board issues uh before we knew that this was what was happening and we thought it was maybe a you know chrome update because you could like uh reset the battery and then all could be well yeah um and you know we've had some weird stuff like that well, hey, that update just hit weird.

Well, sure.

That's every single one of them was a middle school boy. So then you're like, okay, what are these kids doing? And then they started, you know, we have the, We have our tech help center. We have that at the middle school as well. And this is just how ridiculous it was. They would do it in class. Chromebook quicks working. So they walked themselves down to our tech help center to get help with a device that they just fried. So then we just had the list because we have issue forms.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah. We didn't really come up with our list of 20. We came up, we just looked at our issue forms and then did investigations and they confessed.

That's funny. You put them under a spotlight and did bad cop, good cop.

Well, I held up a Chromebook and we, I was like, I must, I stuck the pen in it. You tell me what you did right now. Or this thing catches a fire.

We got an email from from a listener, Jonas, and that is not a real name. He's asked us to protect his identity. But he said he works for a series of schools, small, roughly a thousand students, said that they there were a group of kids that were having a competition to see how long they all could hold the graphite in there as.

It heated up.

Said all four of them managed to get caught simultaneously as puffs of smoke were rising in the classroom. You can only imagine this taking place. I know. And the one he sent us some pictures, you know, with damaged USB, melted USB port, said the winner of the challenge managed to burn himself by holding onto the graphite so long that it got that hot. And the ringleader got expelled from school. with just a week or so left of class in the school year. So they've sent messages to parents

My God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By the way, Visor, check out Visor. It's a great time to look at Visor so you can know where all of your things are. Visor.cloud slash K12 Tech Talk. If you're preparing for your device collections, you want to audit your stuff this summer, even if your budget is tight, Visor has a low cost addition called Essentials. they do asset management so you can track how many devices you have with the tick tock trend check out visor.cloud slash k12 tech talk we should do this at midwest tech talk

What's that put.

Things in us

No no we've you you clearly remember the incident okay yes you're right i actually went back and dug that video out and showed some people.

Midwest Tech Talk, we, which is what, I mean, it's a thing of legend, but we smashed a Chromebook on stage with a battle axe after putting it in an aquarium with water.

And didn't take the battery out to begin with.

Yeah, and something with battery and air and water.

And small fire. And sharp metal objects. Yeah, that was great.

No big deal. Yeah, come hang out with us in July at MidwestTechTalk.com. maybe we'll maybe we'll I still think this is a good idea we can do it outside oh

Goodness yeah I have a competition who can hold the graphite in longest I like it my money's on Jay anything else Mark any other comments any other topics this week all good all right nothing else Chris.

No well I guess yes I'm pumped up for next week getting a FortiGate and getting FortiAnalyzer installed oh cool if you're in the interest of that, you can email fortinetpodcast.fortinet.com. But yeah, I'm excited about that. Excited for summer projects. That's probably a good episode we can unpack is summer projects next time-ish.

Yeah, it's that time of year. Hopefully your graduation goes off without a hitch tonight.

We're streaming it. We'll see what happens.

All those of you in the same boat in the next week, until we talk again, happy graduation. We will see you next week.

The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh, Chris, and Mark and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations that we're affiliated with. The material and information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.