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Councilwoman Robin Haynes urges review of district cell-phone policy after student loses grad trip
Summary
Councilwoman Robin Haynes told the Lake County School Board she had to fight to overturn her eighth-grader's lost grad venture after a phone was briefly picked up; she called policy "51 36" a "negligence trap," proposed a safe-harbor retriever window and asked the board to schedule a policy workshop to align the policy with Florida Statute 1006.07.
Councilwoman Robin Haynes told the Lake County School Board on April 13 that her eighth-grade daughter lost a graduation trip after briefly picking up a fallen phone, and she urged the district to revise its cell-phone policy, which she described as vague and prone to selective enforcement.
Haynes, who said she was speaking both as a parent and as a councilwoman from Mascotte, said the school formally verified the phone was never used but that her daughter nonetheless lost the grad venture. "The fact that a parent has to go to war with administration to correct an obvious injustice proves that our current policy has evolved into a negligence trap," Haynes said.
Haynes told the board she provided a packet outlining three standardized solutions for a policy workshop and urged the board to add a "safe harbor retriever clause" that would grant a 32-second window for students to return a dropped device to a stored location. She asked the board to "align our local code with true intent of the Florida statute 1006.07, stopping digital distractions without criminalizing the act of storing property."
Haynes outlined how the policy's current phrasing allows each teacher discretion over where a phone must be stored, which she said can create multiple violations in a single school day as students move between classes. "When a policy is written with vague language like 'as designated by a teacher' or an escalating scale without a fixed ladder, it invites unconscious bias and selective enforcement," she said.
Superintendent Diane Kornighi acknowledged Haynes had reached out and said she had responded to Haynes's earlier email. Board members and administrators did not take formal action at the meeting; the matter was presented as public comment and Haynes asked the board to review the packet and consider a policy workshop to discuss the three proposed options.
The board did not vote on changes to policy 51 36 at the April 13 meeting. Haynes said many families lack the resources to pursue overturning discipline decisions and asked the district to adopt a clearer, districtwide standard to reduce inconsistent enforcement.
