Around Oakville, phones were once a staple around the building: they were used for passes, transcribing and even class activities like Kahoot or Gimkit. To state it plainly, this ban makes school a much different environment — for the worse.
Superintendent Dr. Jeff Haug broke down how the Mehlville School District views and interprets Missouri Bill 68 in a statement released on Aug. 8, 2025, stating, “Beginning with the 2025-2026 school year, the Missouri law (Senate Bill 68) requires that all school districts adopt a policy restricting students’ use of electronic personal communication devices during the day…”
The bill and district’s interpretation has some slight variation because of the indefinite language used in Bill 68. As a whole, communication in OHS has changed — what used to be the flurry of Snapchat notifications and groupchats is now a silent landscape of online culture.
However, what I find that I miss most is just being able to have background music during solo work time. It is not that I am trying to tune out any potential announcements from either my teacher or the intercom, but I focus better when I don’t have to hear the clacking of keyboards around me or the whistling of noses as we start to enter cold and flu season. Plus there is a level of social aspect to be considered because many people that I know would share their music in class in the form of passing an Airpod or earbud off to a friend.
Another quality-of-life issue that arises with the phone ban takes place in journalism in the form of being able to snap a quick photo on my phone or record and transcribe an interview. This leads to having to come up with ‘district approved’ workarounds that add more headache and time that could have been put forth elsewhere.
Additionally, an adverse effect that came from this bill is the bathroom pass disaster. Before we had a flawed, yet working system where as long as the bathroom wasn’t at capacity, you could submit one of two of your daily passes and it would be fine. For a short while after the bell rang, there would be teachers posted in the halls to check if students had active passes by asking us to open it on our phones — see the problem? Now administration is reverting back to the 1900s with having physical bathroom passes alongside the electronic pass system.
I know that the phones did take away attention from teachers and would host their own problems, and there is more person-to-person interaction now than ever in the last three years I’ve been here at OHS. But I do wish we could have the best of both worlds and have permission to use our phones more freely apart from the pre-approved short “academic use period” while maintaining the new inadvertent social standards created by this bill.
