ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” article. It is an editorial by the editor.

I’ve been surprised lately that only now school districts and school officials are toying with the idea of prohibiting students carrying or using smart phones during the school day.

Like that old fella in the Jimmy Johns commercial: “What took you so long?”

Smart phones should be regarded about the same way as cigarettes 60 years ago — unwelcome and illegal on campus. And for teachers, staff and administrators, only in designated areas where their use will not distract others from handling their daily chores.

I suppose a lot of teen-agers will strenuously object to such new rules and they’re probably offended with the comparison between smart phones and cigarettes. Yes, my suggestion is based on the proposition that both are bad for you.

Smart phones use distracts others, distracts their owners and users, and do not provide anyone in school with a useful or necessary service. If Mom or Dad, or guardian needs to get in touch with a student, the process can be done the same way it was bygone days — call the office and have school personnel let students know if there is an obvious need for them to make emergency connection.

My wife taught at Wayland for quite a spell and I’ve asked her, other teachers and even administrators whether smart phones should be banned the school campus. They overwhelmingly have responded “yes” to my unscientific poll.

We as a society have become hopelessly addicted to these marvelous tools. It is rare for me to see anyone in public without a phone, something we oldsters remember as being in a fixed place in our homes.

Now, recall Karl Malden and his commercial: “Don’t leave home without it.”

I submit that the reason for a smart phone call the vast majority of the time is for lame chit chat, not for relaying essential information. Cell phones generally are used for social or entertainment purposes.

One of my biggest concerns I’ve seen in classrooms in my experience is that there are too many distractions away from the necessary tasks at hand, whether it be smart phones, phony trips to the bathroom or other feeble excuses to get away from the tedium offered in class.

As Robert Kennedy Jr. once said, perhaps before he had part of his brain eaten by a worm, “America today is the least informed, but best entertained society in history.”

My first three encounters with smart phones contributed greatly to my cynical opposition to them.

1. I used to get calls from a friend in his car, in which calls were suddenly dropped and conversations cut short. And he was demonstrating reckless behavior behind the wheel.
2. My first encounter with Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf was when he stopped in at the newspaper office and had me summoned to the front desk, only to take a smart phone call and leave me standing purposely with nothing to stay or do while on deadline.
3. During final interviews for a new superintendent at Hastings, the school board president asked all in attendance to silence their phones because of the seriousness of the meeting. The board vice president then took a call and hurriedly left the meeting, leaving the rest of us to resent the implication that he didn’t have to play by the rules. He explained angrily that the call to him was important business.

With so many distractions beckoning our attention, competing with other stimuli much more important, I hereby urge all school officials to ban smart phones on campus and treat offenders just like they were caught smoking in the boys’ room more than 50 years ago.