DD school trip in 2 hours. Woke up to a lot of ranty msgs from another parent

[BackwardsGoing]

Who has just twigged that the kids are not allowed phones for their 2 nights 3 days away.

School has communicated this in emails, letters and F2F meetings for most of the year.

Ranty parent (RP) wants all parents to stand in solidarity against the no phone rule. This morning. While the kids are getting on the coach!

AIBU to say this is (a) bonkers (b) far too late and (c) bonkers.

BTW children are year 6 / 10-11 yo and the school has promised regular updates via Facebook.

Exactly - surely statistically the most likely type of harm a child will come to walking to school is from traffic / crossing roads. A phone won't help prevent this and may in fact make it more likely as they'll be looking at their phone not the road.

Children use to walk home without phones all the time up (incl my own) until recent years and most of them coped without a phone.

There is always the phone at the school office in an emergency.

Child gets lost on way to school ' I'll just phone mummy to find out where I am'.

Well, as mine had hand-me-down old iPhones, I could easily locate them with find my iPhone. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Yep - the number of kids (and adults, to be fair) that I see blithely walking into the road with their eyes on the screen is terrifying. I had to give a young lad a huge blast on my car horn just yesterday for just stepping out in front of me on his phone.

I'd say a ten year old is less safe walking to school with a phone in their hand

All of mine survived Y6 residential without a phone though.

My two kids, admittedly this was about 10 years ago got a phone for their birthday before secondary (may/June birthdays). I really struggle to see why children need phones, I mean what do they text about?!

^children at primary

Completely agree that that there shouldn't be phones!
I had a feeling from the posts that it was the child complaining.

My DS (10 - y5) is one of about 3 in his entire class who don't have phones. We're really feeling the pressure to give him one next year! But like others have said the school aren't being unreasonable not allowing them considering not all children will have phones either.

He goes have a GPS watch which he can call home on. Thats it - they're fab!

How long and treacherous are these walks to school where something they have done for 5 years on a daily basis still.means they get lost the second they do it themselves. Perhaps if they werent wandering off looking for pokemon???

@scaryteacher 🤣 sounds familiar. Mine are 19 & 22 and they do everything one handed so they don’t have to put the bloody phone down!

It's great that RP's son is going to learn that he can actually survive a few days without the phone. It's a bit odd that RP was so feeble about it though, you'd think if she'd had previous experience of school trips she'd have been in a position to tell him that he'd be fine without it.

Not so long ago just about all yr 5/6 aged kids used to walk to school without an adult.
There's more of a case for them needing a phone if using buses or trains as transport can fail but the legs of a healthy kid don't.
Anyway, glad the situation was resolved, I expect that parent is now horribly embarrassed not to have just stood firm with her PLB in the first place.

Glad they didn't make a scene. Any other parent would have told their child no from the outset and not engaged in discussion. The child will have to learn that the rules are there for a reason and he needs to respect them. She must be mortified this morning thinking about her manic late night texts.

She sounds unhinged. I feel a bit sorry for her. And the kid.

Oh we've had parents wanting kids to bring their phones and cameras to the bloody year 2 residential! No flipping way would mine be allowed to bring anything expensive or breakable when they're going away overnight and are going to be off their tits on haribo and sugar and excitement and not get a wink of sleep anyway!

As a guide leader myself, mobile phones brought on camp are the biggest ball ache ever!

In the past we had one instance of a girl who text their parents 2 minutes after arriving to come and get them. The parent then didn’t text me and drove 2 hours in the dark to fetch her. First I learned of it was the security guards bringing mum to me (it was a huge camp)
By this time the guide was happily drinking hot chocolate and chatting and didn’t want to leave. I sent her home anyway. This caused a chain reaction of girls crying that they were homesick too.

On another camp we had a mum texting the daughter for the entire week and this made the girl so homesick that she wouldn’t eat for days. We took the phone off her When we discovered the reason. we were hundreds of miles away so she couldn’t go home.

And another unit that I know of went to PGL and on the way there they had a minor accident on the motorway where their coach wing mirror was clipped.
It was dealt with and they were on their way.
One guide who wasn’t meant to have their phone text her mum to say they had been in an accident on the motorway.
When mum tried to call the guide and the leader there was no signal as they were in the countryside. Cue the parent sharing it on FB and 30 parents in full on panic mode that they couldn’t get hold of the group.
They arrived to find police at the PGL who had been searching for the accident.
So much police time wasted.

Just like to point out that Ranty Parent will be the first to complain when someone posts a photo of their child in swimwear / underwear / Pjs / snoring like a train to social media.

My 3 and 5 year olds had a 3 day 2 night residential recently just recently (we're abroad, school starts when they're 3). They all managed without phone calls from parents so I would expect 10-11 year old to be able to handle it too.

She got really frantic around 4.45am

Rude cow

That parent sounds like a pain in the arse!

I can understand being worried,but I cannot for the life of me understand her kicking off about it now,the morning they go of all days!

Our youngest DD11 is going away for a trip soon with her school and they're not allowing the children to take phones and we've excepted that and our DD is autistic and has some physical disabilities so that mum will just have to suck it up.

I'd just reply, "Yeah, they told us that ages ago."

We do get a message from school via the mass email to let us know they've arrived at a destination and again when they're about to leave if it's one where there might be traffic impacting upon collection time at school. I appreciate those since I do get very anxious with family members on motorways but would expect nothing else!

God I remember taking Y6s on a residential after having advised that phones were not allowed. First phones came out in the service station on the way there. I politely asked the two girls to put their phones away, reminded them that they shouldn't have brought them and we were met getting off the coach back at school by an angry mob. The lead of the mob shouted in my face that I was taking away her right as a parent to contact her child and that I was a nasty bitch.

Ahh, warm fuzzy memories of teaching! Hats off to anyone still on the front line.

Some of our year 5s and 6s walk to and from school by themselves so they need phones

Why?

There can be a good reason for a primary school child to have a phone . Mine walks herself to dance classes after school, and texts to let us know she’s there. The dance teacher doesn’t take a register or call us if dd doesn’t appear, as most of the other kids are older or are brought by car, so there isn’t any system in place. If dd didn’t have a phone, she could in theory be missing for hours before we realised, which I’m not ok with at 9yo.

But on a residential, no way!