Pontiac School Board Weighscell Phone Ban After Lockdown

By Tony Sapochetti

PONTIAC – The lockdown after the Aug. 28 gun scare at Pontiac Township High School was handled well, elementary school district board members said Thursday, but they wondered whether it showed that cell phones should be banned on campus.

The board members offered their thanks to the police officers, students, faculty and anyone else who was involved in the incident.

“This is really a testament of all the training that has been done … and it’s really important that we take these things seriously,” member Joshua Thompson said. “My congratulations to everyone on a job well done.”

The high school is in a separate school district.

Board member Ed Lipinski raised the question of whether cell phones should be banned from Pontiac Junior High School.

Cell phones are allowed on the campus, but they must be kept in lockers or backpacks.

Public safety and school officials have said that such communication devices should not be used during emergency situations, such as the Code Red lockdown prompted that day by the discovery of six handguns at the high school. Three boys face charges related to the weapons and what prosecutors say was a plan to sell them.

Cell phones and other devices make it hard to control the flow of information. The spread of rumors can make it hard for officials to control the situation.

“I think it causes problems,” Superintendent Steve Graham said. “People were getting different kinds of information from the students, and then the parents would show up at the school, and then you have to take police officers off searching for the guns and put them on crowd control with the parents. It just magnifies the problem.”

Graham said a ban is not so simple, however.

“If we ban cell phones, how will we monitor it? And I think we will have an uprising from the community,” Graham said.

The district already has implemented one change for disseminating information, he said.

Graham, who has a daughter at the high school, said he thought he heard a recording when he called the school on the day of the lockdown. He later learned three secretaries were taking calls for hours and reading a script.

The elementary school district now has a recording system to play phone announcements in these situations.

“I’m really sorry that it happened, but I’m glad that it did because it gave us a wakeup call,” Graham said.

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