By Zoey Lee ‘27
Along with the many new administrators this year came new policies, including the phone policy and the enforcement of the dress code using the phone policy. The execution of the phone policy kicked off with a great start at the beginning of the year. Teachers made sure every student turned their phone in at the start of each class. Unsurprisingly, the effort to maintain this policy has quickly waned over the past two months. Teachers no longer count them, and rarely explicitly ask for phones. Nevertheless, the act of submitting phones has not brought a drastic change to my classroom experience. There were two significant effects. One being random alarms going off in class, forcing the teacher to identify the phone causing such cacophony; the other is that students constantly forget to retrieve their phones at the end of class. I think the whole thing is just an inconvenience. Everything you can do on a phone, you can do on a computer. The one thing that has brought me enjoyment from this whole thing is hearing all the different names that people call the phone container: purgatory, phone jail, phone parking lot, phone caddy, etc.
As for the dress code, it has not been enforced in the past years, so there was a developed “norm” separate from the actual dress code. People barely knew what the actual dress code stated. The “norm” seemed to draw the line at sweatpants and busy graphics. I wish the dress code could have been changed to align with the norm rather than its current rules. Also, I find “blouses” to be a vague term. I see people wearing tight t-shirts all the time. Does that count as a blouse? I also do not understand how tank tops are more conducive to a productive learning environment than t-shirts. I have also seen teachers wear t-shirts. Although the administration is trying to enforce the dress code by saying that teachers will take our phones and hand them to the Dean’s office if we’re out of dress code, I have only ever seen one actual case of this. I can say for sure that I’ve seen more instances of people being out of dress code. There is a discrepancy between what they say they will do and what actually gets done. To me, it seems like the administration cares, but teachers don’t as much.