Pubdate: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 Source: Miami Herald (FL) Copyright: 2006 The Miami Herald Contact: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/262 Author: Fred Grimm Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth) BEEP-BEEP-BEEP: SCHOOL BOARD'S STILL OUT OF TOUCH Digital watches were blacklisted in 1986. The faint peep-peep-peep alarms annoyed teachers, who failed to realize that what they were hearing was the distant sound of a fast train coming. The wrist watches were deemed "objects in the classroom which disrupt the orderly educational process" and were banned from Dade County schools. Beepers were also forbidden in '86. Students outfitted with the devices were assumed to be drug dealers expecting a summons from someone needing a boost in algebra II. The beeper ban didn't stop drug dealing in the schools; didn't even stop beepers. It was, however, the signal effort of a long, futile struggle by school boards to beat back the onslaught of gadgetry. No Weapons, Beepers The following year, Broward schools added beepers to a list banning pistols, shotguns, BB guns, knives, ice picks, dirks, brass knuckles, billy clubs, machetes, tear gas, guns, Chinese stars and razor blades, although one principal admitted that the problem was mostly aesthetic: "Students think it is cool to carry a paging device and act like you're a cool drug dealer." Last week, the Broward School Board was at it again. Board members might as well have stood on Fort Lauderdale beach and commanded the waves to roll backward. The board prohibited iPods, the ubiquitous accessory owned or coveted by all cool or wanna-be-cool teenies. Personal laptop computers, which allow students unrestricted access to e-mail, unseemly websites, games and those slander-laden blogs posted on MySpace.com, were banished from school campuses. But the board -- capitulating to reality -- had given up trying to separate students from their cellphones two years ago. By then, cellphones had evolved into an adolescent body part. (A study by the Pew Internet & American Life project found 45 percent of American kids between 12 and 17 were armed with cellphones.) A ban would require mass amputations. Besides, parents, obsessive about keeping in touch with their kids since 9/11 and the Columbine High School massacre, had lobbied hard to indulge their children's desire for perpetual electronic connectedness. Board's A Bit Slow Allowing cellphones, however, renders laptop and iPod bans pretty meaningless. Rob Callender, trend director of the Teenage Research Unlimited marketing firm, explained that the school board was up against what he called "converging technologies." He said, "It's getting tougher to separate what students can have from what they can't." "No way can they control this," said Alex Noya, a young sales rep at a Verizon Wireless shop in Fort Lauderdale. "They're about a year behind the technology." Noya picked up a normal-looking cellphone, pulled a wafer the size of a guitar pick from one side and said -- as if it might mean something to me -- "Two gigabytes." He said this ostensibly school-legal phone included a built-in MP-3 music player with the capacity to store 3,000 songs. Not to mention video. Another ordinary-looking cellphone unfolded into a virtual mini laptop, with a complete pixie finger keyboard, a screen and two tiny stereo speakers -- perfect for perusing the Web, listening to music, reading and sending e-mail or composing and posting blogs. Also good for taking pictures of the math test at 10 a.m. and transmitting the image to a buddy facing the same exam at 2 p.m. Noya said modern kids simply are armed with more technology than a school board can police. Certainly more than he enjoyed back in the horse-and-buggy days at Barbara Goleman High School, where he was in the pre-iPod (if you can imagine that) class of 1998. Looking a little wistful, he remembered, "All I had back then was two beepers."