The Caesar Rodney School District’s cell phone policy has been changed slightly after it passed the third and final reading at the Aug. 26 school board meeting.

    The policy’s consequences for using a cell phone or electronic communication equipment during school hours will not change, but now instead of having principals hold the confiscated electronics for a certain number of days, the devices will be returned to parents.

    Students will continue to receive a warning, three days in-school suspension, three days out-of-school suspension and a superintendent hearing for each of the subsequent offenses. Parents still will be called in for a conference after each offense.

    Superintendent Kevin Fitzgerald said the administrators brought up the revision to the policy at a summer meeting, and although it’s not a tremendous problem the district doesn’t want to go into the collection business.

    Caesar Rodney High School Principal Elvina Knight said the school wanted to change the policy to help out families who don’t have a landline and need the cell phone to communicate with their children.

    “So many of our students are involved with band, a club after school and need to make contact,” she said.

    With the new policy, there’s more flexibility because when parents come in for the school conference they can decide if they want to take the cell phone right away or leave it with the school for a few days, Knight said.

    “We don’t want to have a family be without communication with their child,” she said.

    Knight estimated they confiscate approximately 15 phones a day, which she considers to be fairly low in a school of 2,000 students.

    In other business…

    The McIlvaine Early Childhood Center renovation continues on schedule and will be able to have 21 completed classrooms rather than the original estimate of 19 finished and two unfinished.

    Fitzgerald said when the final bids came in as well as the permit fees, they figured out the cost of the overall project and were able to finish more of the project than anticipated at first.

Email Jayne Gest at jayne.gest@doverpost.com