Did you see the new policy where Akron Public Schools is locking away some students cellphones?
We are starting at East, Buchtel and Ellet.
We have contracted with a company called Yondr for $43,450 to lease 2,475 locking pouches.
East and Buchtel’s campuses include grades six through 12, and Ellet is nine through 12. (What does that tell you about what the leaders think of different kids in different schools? They like Ellet kids more. I think they just forced Ellet into the program so it wouldn’t look like what it really is: a racist / classist program.)
I guess it’s already happening. They say the bags will be ready for use on February 27.
This is all under the guise of safety. This will make our schools safer.
I supposed there is some safety issue to it. But that’s certainly not the entire story. And it may not even be the driving factor.
The truth is: teachers can’t compete with phones. Their content is irrelevant. Their presentations are often dry and boring. Kids are underslept and underfed. Their homelives are tumultuous because 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
The median household income in Akron is $42,129.
The cost of living in Akron is 14% lower than the national average. But our Median household income is 39% lower in Akron than the national household income. ($69560 – $42129 = $27431. $27431 / $69560 = 0.394)
So if 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, the number of Akronites living paycheck to paycheck is much higher. SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER.
This means there is more stress at home, which leads to more fighting, more alcoholism, more addiction, more crime, etc. I know one test Akron kids are getting better and better at: Increasing their ACEs score.
Our institutions are notoriously bad at innovating. So they just force us to do things we don’t want to do.
And that’s when more crime happens.
Here are 5 easy ways to get into these ridiculous Yondr pouches we are leasing for $17.55 each:
This video was the very first thing my Firestone senior showed us at dinner the day this policy was announced.
So now we are just making more criminals. I’m certain there is going to be some sort of punishment if you do these things to get into the pouch.
At their best, phones are a comfort. You can text a friend, look at a dog, talk to your mom. And now they are taking them away by force. At their worst, phones are an addiction.
The war on drugs is a war on addiction and the only thing it has done successfully is institutionalize racism. Of course this phone policy will be harder on minorities than white kids. That’s all this really comes down to. Black kids and poor kids are not sitting up straight and paying attention. What can we do? I KNOW! Take away their phones because they are just being lazy and ignorant.
This is going to make things worse. Not better. It’s going to push lower income kids further away because the system makes no sense to them. It will get them in more trouble. It’s madness.
How can we have lived through the largest protests in the history of America with Black Lives Matter and we still can’t even slightly grasp the racism at the foundation of everything we do in this country?
But let me leave you with this: The varnish is starting to rub off in all of society. In Ohio, compulsory education laws require children between the ages of 6 and 18 to attend school. And then what happens at 18? You get a 40 hour a week job that barely pays the bills (remember the 63% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck fact?). So they just keep us running and running and running.
They force us to live in over-priced boxes, going to increasingly irrelevant schools, and ending up in dead-end jobs that make us scrape and claw to get by. And what happens if you don’t follow that regiment? You go to prison.
As of January 2023, the United States has the second largest prison population in the world, and the sixth highest per-capita incarceration rate. One out of every 5 people imprisoned across the world is incarcerated in the United States. In 2018, the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 698 people incarcerated per 100,000; this includes the incarceration rate for adults or people tried as adults.
CAN’T YOU SEE IT!?
There is no freedom in America. It’s just a lifetime of moving from one prison to the next. And you’ll see… they will push the age of social security back so that we have to stay in our work prisons until we can’t physically package one more widget for Amazon.