When Principal Scott Palladino assigned a faculty committee to reexamine Wareham High School’s cell phone policy, he assumed they would arrive at a cut-and-dried policy proposal: a blanket, all-day ban. Palladino was prepared to enforce that initiative—he saw the logic in it and was well aware of staffers’ complaints about how phones were interrupting learning at the Massachusetts school.
The committee returned with a compromise in which phones weren’t outright banned but needed to be placed in classroom cubbies during instruction. The proposal, which mirrors many other school districts’ approach to cell phones, wasn’t what Palladino expected, but he chose to follow the recommendation. A former teacher himself, Palladino had asked the committee to make a tough call, and they had put in the requisite time, effort, and research. If he didn’t listen to them now, why would they listen to him in the future when he made his own policy recommendations?