Officials at North Carolina’s Southern Alamance Middle School were recently forced to remove mirrors in school bathrooms to cut down on students ditching class to record TikTok videos.
Les Atkins, spokesman for the Alamance-Burlington School System, told WFMY “students were going to the bathroom for long periods of time and making TikTok videos,” with some students leaving class up to nine times per day.
Atkins said the mirrors were central to many of the videos, and since they were removed things have improved.
“Not as many visits to the bathroom, not staying as long and students are held accountable and then when there’s accountability you see a great difference,” he said.
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School officials also implemented a Smart Pass digital hall pass that allows administrators to track where students are at all times, a change that was available within existing software at no additional cost to taxpayers.
Atkins said the “adjustments” were part of the district’s broader effort to teach students “digital citizenship.”
“We’re trying to educate students: we all have cell phones now. We have to learn to use them. We have to learn when to put them down,” he said.
“We strive to limit distractions so students can focus on learning,” district officials wrote in a letter to parents cited by WTVD. “Though this is an adjustment, we believe these changes will foster a better learning environment by minimizing disruptions.”
The changes in North Carolina follow warnings from tech experts that Chinese-owned TikTok is indoctrinating American youth though the app.
“The information environment is being actively manipulated by our enemy. That is a problem,” Kara Hendrick, teach policy director for the Heritage Foundation, told Fox Business’ The Bottom Line in November. “It is a five-alarm fire and we don’t even know what that’s going to look like 10 years from now when children who are getting all of this information, they’re internalizing it, they’re believing that its’ true.”
“You have estimates this year saying over half of Gen Z uses TikTok search as their number one search engine,” Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan said at a Fortune conference. “So they’re not just going on after school and just kind of mindlessly scrolling. No, they’re actually searching for terms: Gaza, Israel and getting a flood of (Communist Chinese)-influenced propaganda in front of their eyeballs almost constantly, all day, every day.”
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While TikTok disputes the claims, states like Montana have moved to ban the app, while other states and individual districts have banned cellphone use at school altogether. A judge in Montana in late November issued a preliminary injunction to block the ban there from taking effect on Jan. 1 after TikTok and its users sued over free speech violations.
Elsewhere, schools that have banned cell phone use by students over concerns about the impact of social media on mental health and student safety are reporting drastic improvements in student behavior.
“The learning change in the classroom is remarkable. Students are engaged because they’re not getting notifications in their pocket,” Sarah Speight, a Boone High School ninth-grade English teacher in Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel. The Orange County district banned phones in August, and Speight predicted in December “that we’re going to see a positive impact on test scores for the schools that have implemented this with consistency.”
The change in Orange County stems from a Florida law passed last year that prohibits student phone use during “instructional time” that’s making a positive impact across the state.
“I don’t know … what went into making up that rule, but I can tell you that the result of it on a very side scale has been extraordinarily positive for (students’) mental health from an anecdotal perspective,” Edgewater High School Principal Heather Kreider told Education Week.
“I have only seen positive things,” East River High School Principal Becky Watson confirmed to the Sentinel.
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