There was righteous outrage this week among many public school parents, and that outrage highlighted a troubling disconnect that’s to blame for many of our political ills.
As schools set to open and others welcomed students back for the 2025–26 school year, many parents learned for the first time of the FOCUS Act. That’s the law passed by our Legislature and signed by our governor earlier this year that bans smartphones and other smart devices from Alabama public school classrooms.
Students of all ages caught with a phone are subject to stiff penalties, including in-school suspension for five days for a second offense and 15 days in an alternative school for a third offense.
The notices sent out by most districts alerting parents to these new rules were met with surprise, and then outright anger. Parents took to social media to complain and phone lines at central offices started to ring.
They have legitimate concerns. And before you go off on a “back in my day” rant and tune everything out, hear me out.
This is not the old days. We know this by the active shooter drills our kids are forced to endure now and the bulletproof backpacks and safe rooms that are sold. Try sending your kid off to school on the mornings after one of the way-too-common school shootings in this country, and then tell me about back in your day.
We have done absolutely nothing of substance to combat these school shootings (or any other type of mass shooting), choosing instead to bend to the will of the NRA and the gun lobby and pretend that this thing that only happens with such frequency in America simply can’t be curtailed. Parents, rightfully, feel helpless.
That smart device is a lifeline. Even if it’s not much of one.
It brings a sense of peace and control to know that you can communicate with your child should something happen. Maybe it’s delusional to a certain extent, but on the other hand, how many times have phone calls from students alerted police to an ongoing active shooter or other emergency?
Beyond that, though, those devices are a convenience for most parents—a way to tell kids to remember their doctor’s appointments or for kids to ask for the lunch money or medicine they forgot.
Are they abused by a lot of kids? Of course they are. All the time.
And those parents would tell you there should be strict rules about usage and when kids can have them out or even turned on. But those rules should be determined at the local level, or even at the local schools, where principals and teachers are much more in tune with the student body they’re serving.
That brings us to the disconnect problem.
It’s not as if the FOCUS Act was snuck through the legislature. There was lots and lots of talk about this bill in media outlets from one end of the state to the other. Press releases were sent out. The bill’s sponsors bragged about it and Governor Kay Ivey held a very public signing ceremony for it.
Yet, the overwhelming majority of parents seem to have completely missed all of it. Completely missed something that will affect their lives on a daily basis. Completely missed something that they are absolutely outraged over.
That is a problem. A big one.
There has been a purposeful wedge driven between the general public and the political process that is supposed to serve it. That process has been so convoluted and so distorted that most people have given up trying to follow it, and that’s before we get to the nastiness of today’s political climate.
The result is highlighted in our voter turnout numbers: In 2022, about a third of voting eligible Alabamians cast a ballot. For the 2024 presidential election, less than 60 percent of registered voters—those who took the time to actually register—participated.
Considering the information age we live in, where obtaining agendas, calendars and legislation information and meeting dates are a few keystrokes away, that’s a staggering lack of care. But at the same time, it’s also not hard to understand when you dig down to the ground level.
The average person has allowed themselves to be pushed out of the process by a group of politicians who really don’t want them mucking up their plans. They’ve done this by turning all of politics into a national-level screaming match about issues that, let’s be honest, don’t affect hardly anyone. I mean, really, how many transgender athletes do you know?
That has diverted attention from the school board hiring the mayor’s buddy to handle the construction project and the county commission paving all the roads in front of their lake homes and the city council revoking a business license from a guy who insulted the council president. And the state legislature passing a law that you really, really hate.
That local government is not sexy or thrilling. It usually doesn’t wind up on Fox or MSNBC. The meetings are usually boring and uneventful. But paying attention to them is absolutely vital for the health of your local community and to you personally.
Remember, this government is of the people and by the people. And the people … that’s you.
