With the recent popularity of ear buds (e.g. AirPods, Galaxy buds, etc.), we are seeing a growing trend of students who enjoy wearing their wireless earphones around their friends and in
public. In the middle school, we do not allow students to have their phones with them during the school day, so we are also asking students to remove their AirPods (or similar) when walking around. They shouldn’t have anything to listen to anyway, and we don’t want these items to become symbols of social status and anti-social behavior. Occasionally, students need earphones in class, but they certainly don’t need them in the halls.
Along different, but related lines, we have noticed a recent pattern of AirPods being “given” to friends or other kids. It is our experience that AirPods, NOT in their full, original packaging, are unlikely to be genuine gifts and are more likely to belong to someone who has lost them or misplaced them. If your child has AirPods that you didn’t know about and your child tells you they were “given to me” by a friend, it may be worth finding out a little bit more. Often these devices are “named” when they connect to a phone, which means that when someone finds these that have to rename them to make them their own. Please help us work with young people to see this as an opportunity to return these devices to their owners. Unfortunately, the popularity of these items is creating a “finders keepers” attitude, that we would like to replace with one that is kinder to our community and shows empathy to someone who has lost something.
And if your own child has AirPods of their own … I recommend marking them somehow, so that it’s clear they belong to them.