BEEP-BEEP-BEEP: SCHOOL BOARD'S STILL OUT OF TOUCH

Digital watches were blacklisted in 1986. The faint peep-peep-peep
alarms annoyed teachers, who failed to realize that what they were
hearing was the distant sound of a fast train coming.

The wrist watches were deemed "objects in the classroom which
disrupt the orderly educational process" and were banned from Dade
County schools.

Beepers were also forbidden in '86. Students outfitted with the
devices were assumed to be drug dealers expecting a summons from
someone needing a boost in algebra II.

The beeper ban didn't stop drug dealing in the schools; didn't even
stop beepers. It was, however, the signal effort of a long, futile
struggle by school boards to beat back the onslaught of gadgetry.

No Weapons, Beepers

The following year, Broward schools added beepers to a list banning
pistols, shotguns, BB guns, knives, ice picks, dirks, brass
knuckles, billy clubs, machetes, tear gas, guns, Chinese stars and
razor blades, although one principal admitted that the problem
was mostly aesthetic: "Students think it is cool to carry a paging
device and act like you're a cool drug dealer."

Last week, the Broward School Board was at it again. Board members
might as well have stood on Fort Lauderdale beach and commanded the
waves to roll backward.

The board prohibited iPods, the ubiquitous accessory owned or
coveted by all cool or wanna-be-cool teenies.

Personal laptop computers, which allow students unrestricted access
to e-mail, unseemly websites, games and those slander-laden blogs
posted on MySpace.com, were banished from school campuses.

But the board -- capitulating to reality -- had given up trying to
separate students from their cellphones two years ago.

By then, cellphones had evolved into an adolescent body part. (A
study by the Pew Internet & American Life project found 45 percent
of American kids between 12 and 17 were armed with cellphones.) A
ban would require mass amputations.

Besides, parents, obsessive about keeping in touch with their kids
since 9/11 and the Columbine High School massacre, had lobbied hard
to indulge their children's desire for perpetual electronic connectedness.

Board's A Bit Slow

Allowing cellphones, however, renders laptop and iPod bans pretty
meaningless. Rob Callender, trend director of the Teenage Research
Unlimited marketing firm, explained that the school board was up
against what he called "converging technologies." He said, "It's
getting tougher to separate what students can have from what they can't."

"No way can they control this," said Alex Noya, a young sales rep at
a Verizon Wireless shop in Fort Lauderdale. "They're about a year
behind the technology."

Noya picked up a normal-looking cellphone, pulled a wafer the size
of a guitar pick from one side and said -- as if it might mean
something to me -- "Two gigabytes." He said this ostensibly
school-legal phone included a built-in MP-3 music player with the
capacity to store 3,000 songs. Not to mention video.

Another ordinary-looking cellphone unfolded into a virtual mini
laptop, with a complete pixie finger keyboard, a screen and two tiny
stereo speakers -- perfect for perusing the Web, listening to music,
reading and sending e-mail or composing and posting blogs.

Also good for taking pictures of the math test at 10 a.m. and
transmitting the image to a buddy facing the same exam at 2 p.m.

Noya said modern kids simply are armed with more technology than a
school board can police.

Certainly more than he enjoyed back in the horse-and-buggy days at
Barbara Goleman High School, where he was in the pre-iPod (if you
can imagine that) class of 1998.

Looking a little wistful, he remembered, "All I had back then was two beepers."