It's also ridiculous that someone who has a life threatening accident near this school might not be able to call emergency services from their cellphone.

Your appeal to cyber bullying is also baseless unless you can provide some evidence that blocking cell phones at school will accomplish this. This kind of hollow emotional appeal is how we end up with draconian laws that don't actually accomplish anything except massive inconvenience.

I had those issues to, but the school notified parents if the school was closing early due to adverse weather and I made arrangements in advance for after school activities, same way I made arrangements to meet friends before we had mobile phones.

re: cyber bullying I never supported the blocking of cell phone access. My point was that we can survive without having them available to us 24/7. In a school setting having children hand them in and collect them from the teacher at the start/end of every lesson is a reasonable solution. Should some catastrophe befall the the student the teacher is there to call emergency services or contact the parents, if the catastrophe occurs on the way home or the way to school or at break time then the student has their phone.

I don't agree with having the teacher collect them and give them back out because that sounds like a massive waste of time, but students could keep them in their locker, or in their backpacks (with the understanding that use during class would result in immediate confiscation for the day/until a parent collected it), or whatever. They don't need them in hand during class, clearly.

I guess we can just start putting cell phone jammers up everywhere and it'll be fine.