To the School Community:
La Jolla Country Day has long been an institution aimed at producing college-ready students and at encouraging its scholars to envision a future for themselves. For years this has meant a rigorous curriculum designed to simulate the collegiate experience and prepare students for higher education. However, with recent developments the school has lost its aim and placed itself into a current of shakily-supported and questionably necessary objectives which seem only designed to present the school as forwardly progressive. These new additions, specifically the new phone policy, not only fail to uphold the original mission values of Country Day but also appear to serve as pointers towards priggish future aspirations. The phone policy takes us backwards, not only metaphorically but literally, as technology becomes increasingly pervasive in everyday life.
The most egregious facet of this new edict is that it impairs future graduates’ college readiness. College is an open place where students are the only ones responsible for how they spend their time. Country Day has long attempted to prepare students for this by teaching the importance of good time management skills early on in their education. Classroom skills at LJCDS will definitely help in college and our students are likely to be more prepared than their peers. However, by eliminating phones, CD is not teaching students time management skills necessary for their collegiate future. Instead, it limits the student’s ability to adapt and learn how to balance phones with life. Essentially, CD has begun to prioritize their forward-looking image over the preparatory aspect the school was initially founded on. Without the ability to learn how to balance the phone and the classroom, students will graduate without the skills necessary to keep their phone use in line and will fall short in college when they are then allowed the freedom to use them. Students may not succeed in college because they were failed by a school that promised to prepare them for college.
I have heard many who believe the new laws passed in the California Senate force our school’s hand in banning phones, or that we should follow other private San Diego schools and copy their phone policies. I disagree. The law put into effect by Governor Newsom will not take effect until July 2026, and campuses will not be required by law to ban phones until the 2026-2027 school year. There is no legal necessity for our school to ban phones.
While other schools have banned phones, we should not simply follow just to follow. That’s not a good enough reason. And maybe if copying others is our goal, perhaps we should add a bible-studies class, start school earlier, copy curriculum, and maybe even their color scheme. But of course we don’t do that because LJCDS is not any other school. It’s La Jolla Country Day. Our values used to be focused on an open, future-success-driven, and entirely unique school atmosphere. If this is our only reason for changing our phone policy then we have become a husk that follows other schools in hopes that at some point we’ll find out why they score higher on the SAT or attend more Ivys. We should not base our choices off some other school, they should be evidence-based and future-oriented and not a copycat decision.
I have long appreciated Country Day, and I hope this letter will change things for the better. The purpose of our school should remain squarely focused on preparing kids for the realities of college and not on new-age dystopian “reforms” that fall short of the Country Day standard.
Go Torreys!
William Cleaves
