Calaveras Hills High School (CHHS) has been piloting the Commons app, which the company just introduced to schools this year, CHHS Principal Jonathan Payne said.
Students must download the app on their phone in order to include students in a “geofence” that covers the school campus, Payne said.
“While you’re in that geofence, it restricts social media access and other alternative means that students can use to be distracted in the classroom on campus,” Payne said.
When a student arrives within a certain distance of school grounds, the Commons app sends a notification that says the student has arrived at school, so the student should stay off their phone, Cooper said.
“And if you checked your phone throughout the day, it would keep sending you notifications, like stay off your phone and stay focused,” Cooper said.
The app disables Wi-Fi for the student’s phone, and you couldn’t access Wi Fi as long as you were on school grounds, junior Marques Cooper said.
“It was really odd finding out that we (couldn’t) do anything on our phones now,” Cooper said. “We couldn’t even access our music.”
At the beginning of the school year, CHHS introduced the app to their students during an assembly, telling them that the app was a way for students to keep their phones with them, Payne said. Students would still have access to their phones to do certain things in class, like programming or taking a picture, he added.
“It gave them a chance to still have ownership of their phone, whereas Milpitas High has the rule of turning your phone in, or you had to be able to put your phone in a designated space to not access it,” Payne said. “We were trying to give students an alternative to that by being able to still keep your phone, but just be restricted (from) certain apps that cause you to be distracted in class.”
Commons has a tracker that allows staff to see which students were in compliance with the app, Payne said. However, the issue that he wasn’t fully aware of is that the app still has a lot of bugs because it was a pilot, he said. Sometimes, the app would say that a student wasn’t in compliance, but they actually were, and vice versa, he added.
“They (app developers) have been working out the kinks and the bugs, but it’s been harder to enforce the Commons app with the students because of those bugs that were still in the app that they were sorting through,” Payne said.
There are four settings on a student’s phone that they have to enable, science teacher and site manager for Commons, Kimi Schmidt said. For the app to work properly, the students have to agree to all of the settings; so even if one of the settings is not enabled, then the app doesn’t work, she added.
“They’re able to stream, get on TikTok, pull up Instagram, they’re able to send messages left and right, and then we’re back to the same problem,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt is going to schedule a meeting with the developers of Commons, because they know that she was frustrated with the lack of functionality with the app’s interface, she said.
“They listened, and they actually want to sit down and talk to some kids right now about their participation in the Commons (app),” Schmidt said.
At the beginning of the year, CHHS was hopeful about Commons because they could have a tool that could help teachers and help students graduate on time and without struggles, Schmidt said.
“We realize so much time is lost and wasted on cell phones,” Schmidt said. “If I see a kid with a phone, and I’m giving instructions, I will say, ‘Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me a second time for information.'”
Previously, CHHS used Yondr pouches, a pouch that students would put their phone in and then seal with a key, Schmidt said.
“The kids would just break the pouch or figure out how to open it themselves,” Schmidt said.
CHHS was using Yondr pouches years before COVID, and before Payne came to the school, he said.
“(The school used them) mainly in our SAP (Senior Accelerated Program) classes and our double credit classes as an incentive for students to stay on track, to be able to focus, and be able to obtain those double credits,” Payne said.
As it stands, the leadership team, staff, and students will have to decide if the school will continue with the Commons app, go back to Yondr pouches, or something else, Payne said.
“My goal is to send out some messaging in the form of a survey and ParentSquare, and get more information from parents and students to see, ‘Is this something that they want to continue with? Or do we look at Yondr? Do we look at turning in phones to follow what Milpitas High is doing?'” Payne said.
Payne is going to speak to Schmidt about what is going to be best for the school to do moving into January, he said. If they decide to go back to Yondr pouches, then they would implement that next year, so the conversation will be around what they will do for the phone ban for the rest of the school year, he added.
“It’s very hard to pivot mid-year,” Payne said. “If the survey goes out, even in the next couple of weeks, it’s not going to address what happens in January. That’s more so going to address next school year.”
Schmidt would like to continue using Commons because something like a pouch can break, she said.
“A pouch can be lost,” Schmidt said. “But as long as the app is working and the geofence is up, you should, in theory, be fine.”
