Last year, I finally earned my first cell phone after qualifying for a competition. I kept it safe at home out of fear of losing it, eagerly planning to responsibly bring it to school this year. Instead, the implementation of Michigan’s new framework has brought an unnecessarily harsh and extreme shift to Plymouth-Canton Educational Park (P-CEP).

Before this change, P-CEP operated on a fair, trust-based system: as long as our phones were turned off and invisible in our backpacks, we were trusted to manage our own attention. Now, the administration has escalated the rules to an aggressive level, forcing students to surrender their personal property into classroom "phone caddies." This sudden escalation damages the mutual trust between the administration and the student body.

Furthermore, stripping students of their phones under the guise of "improving focus" is fundamentally flawed. Forcing a phone into a caddie does not automatically make a student lock into a lecture; it simply diverts a student's focus to entirely new, non-digital distractions. When students are bored or disengaged, they will doodle, daydream, or pass notes just as they did for generations before smartphones existed. Removing the technology does not fix the root of classroom engagement—it only creates a climate of anxiety where students are constantly worried about the security of their expensive property sitting across the room.

While the state requires districts to outline an instructional time policy, it leaves the severity entirely up to the local school board. P-CEP does not need punitive phone caddies or extreme lockdowns. We are asking P-CEP administration and the PCCS School Board to completely reverse these harsh new restrictions and restore the original, relaxed guidelines that respected our maturity, protected our property, and trusted us to be responsible.