Here's my stance on phones in school.
You should be able to have one on your person.
During your breaks/in between classes/lunch, you should be able to do whatever you want with it short of recording or taking pictures. Talking on it? Great. Texting? Go right ahead. Listening to music? You should use headphones for that.
You should be able to visibly carry it on your person in your hands during said breaks without risk of having it taken away.
However, it should not interfere with your ability to get to your next class on time. Once that bell rings for your next class to start, you need to be in the classroom at your desk, not texting in the hall.
And when you are in the classroom, it should be put away, on silent or off. While I do support using it during breaks, if I were a teacher, and I saw you looking down in your lap, I would go over there and see if you are using your phone. Obviously if you look like you are quickly putting something away, then you were probably using it. And it should be taken away until the end of the school day.
I don't support taking phones away for more than one day. After all, what if an emergency arises after school? Any policy which has phones taken away for longer than the remaining duration of the school day is short-sighted in my opinion and raises the risk of something happening and the student not being able to do anything to get help in a reasonable amount of time.
I believe my schools were very good about this. My junior-high school had a policy that a phone was not to be seen at any time. Yet I had a holster on my belt that carried my phone in plain sight and I never got any flak for it. I used MP3 players in high school in between classes with no problems. As long as we didn't use them in class, we were fine.
Heck, sometimes some of the teachers would let us use our phones or games when our work was done. I kid you not, I brought a PSOne (Yes, the original Playstation, but the shrunk-down one, like how the PS2 slim and the PS3 slim were) with an LCD screen attached with me to my geometry class and played on it after my work was done, and I sat close to the teacher's desk too, and as long as I showed him that my work was done, he had no problem with it. At least until it was stolen out of my backpack during swim class because I was an idiot and didn't put it in a locker.
But still, most of the kids here were very good about not using phones while the teachers were talking. Must have it lucky here or something.
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