‘Bell to Bell, No Cell’

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

So, with the Arkansas General Assembly in session, I like to keep an eye on what bills have been filed and how they are doing as they make their way (or often, don’t make their way) through the legislative chambers, committees, subcommittees and so forth.

You really never know what you’re going to get. And you never know what might or might no pass. For example, several years ago, there was a bill to ban human cloning in Arkansas… which, I mean, cool, I guess. But was there ever the threat of there actually being human cloning in Arkansas?

There was the bill to make it mandatory to teach cursive handwriting in the third grade. Like, an actual law… to teach cursive to all Arkansas third-graders… and it passed! That will certainly help us keep up with Japan and India and such, right?

See VIEWPOINT, page A5 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

While there are a lot of bills in this session I could talk about here, the one that really got my attention was Senate Bill 142, submitted after 3 p.m. on Wednesday last week, which was the last day to submit bills for this legislative session.

SB142 is the brainchild of first-term state senator Tyler Dees, a Republican from Siloam Springs. It is titled the “Bell to Bell, No Cell Act,” and as you can probably guess from that, the bill aims to ban cell phones on all school campuses in Arkansas.

I say this is Dees’s brainchild but this is really Dees doing the bidding of Gov. Sarah Sanders, who has already used a few state schools as the guinea pig for this idea.

And I get it, at least in theory.

If the students don’t have cell phones, there are probably a lot of issues you could probably curtail, but honestly, it’s just a dumb idea. It’s a rule almost begging to be broken — especially since there are so many completely legitimate reasons for a student to have a cell phone at school.

Teacher and school administrators already have a ton of things to keep in order and keep track of during the school day. Adding this law (and not giving the school districts the authority to set their own cell phone policies) is just asking for unnecessary trouble and was clearly crafted by people who have never been in the classroom.