On May 1, the Madison school district started a pilot program to disconnect students from social media applications. The ban went into effect a week later at my high school, Madison West. A full-scale ban on 30 social media apps. That meant no Snapchat, no Instagram, no Twitter, and seven long class periods.
My friends and I worried about the possibilities of this “pilot program.” The program will study how students react to this temporary ban on these apps. If results are positive after the May-June trial period, it could lead to a permanent, district-wide policy change.
There was some initial pushback. Students and parents complained that under such a ban they would not be able to communicate with their kids without access to certain texting apps on the school Wi-Fi.
At the same time, we understand that some kids are more distracted by social media than others, with issues like next-level bullying on apps like Snapchat and Facebook Live. Kids would FaceTime each other during class, and that could get weird sometimes.
In a May 8 Wisconsin State Journal article, East High’s principal called us “zombies.” I guess if you think about it, we do kind of look like zombies, walking around with our faces in our phones. But we weren’t sleeping on Monday, the first day of the ban at West.
Within a couple of minutes, school boredom set in and I opened Snapchat and tried to send a message. The message failed to send. I turned on my data and texted my friend about it. He sent me an application that created a private network on the school Wi-Fi and within minutes I was cruising the internet, like on any other Monday.
By lunch, everyone else had also figured it out. Apparently, virtual private networks are often used by hackers or people who are paranoid the government will steal their internet secrets. The virtual private network sends information to the social media applications while circumventing the filters put in place by the administration. My friend with a Samsung phone didn’t even need to install the app.
Maybe we are zombies, but we’re pretty smart ones.
Cris Cruz is a freshman at West High School and a teen editor at Simpson Street Free Press, which first published this opinion piece.
