“No earbuds/airpods are permitted in classrooms.” This was the opening sentence for the slide titled cell phones in the 2023-2024 grade level meetings. This is quite a change for Hempfield Area students who have attended the high school for multiple years.

Airpods were typically allowed at the discretion of the teacher, but this year’s handbook says otherwise. Students have been blocking out teachers and their peers with earbuds, but now they better be ready to listen. The second sentence on the same slide read “Phones may be used in class for academic purposes only as defined by the teacher. Not as a reward.” This means that cell phones cannot be used even if students have completed all their work or free time is awarded. Only “academic purposes” are permitted.

Students seem to lose themselves in their phones, and the teachers become invisible. Phones paired with earbuds make being in a classroom feel numb and can make it so easy to forget that one is even in school.
These rules have been addressed, but this transition may be hard for Hempfield students to abide by. We may see more engagement from students as interactions between teachers and students become more frequent.

For now, students of Hempfield are permitted to wear earbuds in transition time between classes, in their lunch periods, and during study halls.