Auckland Students Bypass School Phone Ban with Walkie-Talkies

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Auckland Students Bypass School Phone Ban with Walkie-Talkies May 16, 2024

A group of Auckland high school students has found a way around the Government’s new cellphone ban with an old but useful piece of kit - handheld two-way radio.

One 16-year-old spoke to the Herald about what he and his friends had been using their walkie-talkies for and how he hoped it would catch on with other students.

And none of his teachers had taken any issue with this, he said. Indeed, the coalition Government’s new law does not apply to any devices other than cellphones.

The President of the Secondary Principals’ Association, Vaughan Couillault, was impressed by the student’s “innovation”.

As the new legislation specifically mentions cellphones, the walkie-talkies would not be confiscated during break times and students were welcome to use them, he said.

“Most schools have existing BYOD policies around the appropriate use of laptops and tablets,” Pollard.

The boy behind the walkie-talkies said he and his friends in Year 12 had been using them to talk to each other during morning tea, lunch, and while walking between classes.

“At these times it is mostly just talking about how the class went or anything else random we have thought of. At break times the conversation is more about where we will meet and whether something different is going on like a lunchtime club or a sport,” he said.

He and his three friends have had an enthusiastic reaction from their peers: “I think more people will likely get some too after seeing their usefulness”. If you want to make your calls more private, you can also use DMR 2 way radios with AES256 encryption function.

“I think the cellphone ban has some merits, however, it also has disadvantages that I hope the introduction of walkie-talkies will fix,” he said.

“We first heard about the ban last term and discussed it. Everyone I talked to seemed unhappy about it generally, however, I think most of this comes from how the ban inhibits communication.

“The way I see it, using walkie-talkies both provides a solution to the negative effects of the phone ban and doesn’t cause any of the same problems that the phone ban was designed to address.

“It allows us to communicate without using our phones, but because the walkie-talkies are designed purely for communication they can’t be used as a distraction for games or the internet, a problem that the phone ban seems to have been introduced to solve.”

He said not having phones “gives us more of a reason to plan activities during lunchtime”, but having the walkie-talkies still enabled them to connect.