BY JULIA COX
Staff writer
Now that cell phones have come to Galena, students will have to face new rules at school.
Galena, Alaska now has a cell phone tower that was just put in effect in September. Students of Galena are ready to equip themselves with this technologically advanced mobile device.
Galena high school junior Danielle Thurmond is thrilled about her new cell phone. “I love it,” she said. “I get to keep in touch with all my friends through texting, and I’ll be really pro at texting in class and not getting caught.”
But if superintendant Chris Rietan has his way Danielle won’t be doing very much texting in class.
“We’re looking into drafting a policy where cell phone use will be very close to our rules for IPods,” said Mr. Rietan. “They wouldn’t be allowed during school hours, before 8 and after 4. We want to keep it as simple as possible.
“The bigger issue would be monitoring it in the dorms. Cell phones have internet access and we don’t want kids to stay up all night and losing sleep because they’re texting and just dinking around on the Internet. They could easily just throw it under the covers when somebody walks in the door and continue when they leave. So we are still looking into that.”
According to a recent article from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, we’re going to be seeing a lot of cell phones show up in rural Alaska. GCI provided service in 13 communities in the Nome region by mid-October in 2008. They expected to have 225 new customers by the end of the year but ended up with 800.
GCI is set on having service up in every village throughout Alaska by the end of 2010, according to the News-Miner.
It was The GILA Monster, the high school newspaper which preceded Hawk Highlights, that first broke the story about cell phones coming to Galena in the spring of 2008. GCI had said they were going to apply cell phone service to Galena that summer. It wasn’t until one year later this fall that it finally happened.