Students:

Students are reminded not to leave their belongings laying around the lockers rooms.

We were blessed this morning to have a chapel with Rev. Huizinga of our Redlands, CA, congregation.

He spoke to us about honoring our nation’s leaders.

A representative from Southeast Technical Institute will meet with interested students Wednesday morning.

Juniors and seniors who wish to take the next ACT test are reminded that the registration deadline is Sept. 27.

We will have a 2:30 dismissal on Friday for a teachers’ in-service.

Picture Day for underclassmen is Wednesday, October 9.

General Announcements:

2013 Graduates:  A CD containing all of the graduation photos is in the office.  We have permission from  Photographic  Memories (by Sarah De Jong) to make copies.  Please contact the office if you want just the group photo & your senior jpeg or a copy of the entire CD at cost.

Would you like a project for the winter that would be beneficial for Trinity? We are looking for a person or two to go through a stack of local newspapers that have been collected over the last five years to help us archive our school’s early history.  Take all winter if you like and do it in the coziness of your own home.  Or, you can do it here at school. Contact the school office if you are interested.

First Month of New Policy Goes Well

How schools handle the issue of cell phones at school has evolved about as quickly as the phones have grown in uses and popularity.

Just a few years ago I was in a class with several principals from some of the large public schools in Sioux Falls.  At the time, the Sioux Falls public schools did not allow students to take phones to school at all.  As the principals told of spending several hours every morning frisking students, I became increasingly thankful for the policy Trinity had at that time of allowing students to take phones to school, even if the phones had to be left at the front desk.

In subsequent years, Trinity’s policy no longer required phones to be left at the front desk, but students were then allowed to keep them in their lockers.  The phones had to stay in the lockers during class time, and students were free to use them during breaks or between classes.  This worked to a degree, but with the amount of baggage that students carry around with them it was difficult for teachers to consistently enforce the rule of no phone entering the classroom.  It also caused some added stress to students when phones where misplaced or borrowed while the student was separated from his phone.

This past summer the policy was revisited again, and we now have our third version of the cell phone policy.  The current policy allows students to have their phones on them pretty much wherever they are in the building.  Students are not punished for the possession of phones in the classroom, but they do suffer consequences if the phones are a distraction, such as ringing during class, or if the phones are used during a class.  Even using some of the functions and apps of the phone is not allowed in the classroom.  For example, a student in a math class may not whip out his phone to use the calculator function.  The new policy still limits the use of the phone to outside the classroom.

How is the new policy going?

So far it is going very well.  Comparing it to the past two years, when supposedly phones were forbidden from entering the classroom, we’ve actually had fewer phones ringing during class this year – which gives you an idea of the difficulty we had in enforcing the prior policy.  It seems as though allowing the phones to stay with the students has removed the “cat and mouse” allurement of phones at school, and has decreased the amount of issues we have with them.

We thank our homes for their help and support as the school labors to have the best environment possible for covenant education.