The SSC bulletin is a weekly article covering the events at each Monday’s council meeting.
Members of the Student Staff Council (SSC) entered room 104 at 3:31 p.m. on Monday, April 21 for their weekly meeting. Assistant Principal for School Life Quinn Killy arrived at the meeting 20 minutes late but brought dark chocolate Oreo cookies and a variety of Frito-Lay chips. SSC Vice President Grace Khuzami also brought homemade brown butter chocolate chip cookies. SSC President Natalia Freedman was absent from the meeting because she is in GDS Theater Lab.
This week, the council discussed the structure of the phone ban and the location of weekly assemblies with High School Principal Yom Fox.
Fox said multiple students have asked for the administration to create a designated area to put phones away, so they don’t feel tempted to use their phones during the school day. She said that since she has received many requests from students, parents and faculty, the administration is looking into options for phone storage for the 2025-2026 school year.
This year, the administration banned phone use during the school day. According to the phone ban FAQ on the GDS website, students can choose whether to store their phones in a backpack or locker, as long as phones are “off and away.”
The council discussed how students could store their phones. Some representatives suggested that phone-storage locations be spread out across the school, so students could easily access their phones when they go off campus. Fox said if all students stored their phones, it would create a unified enforcement system, as opposed to the current system where teachers are supposed to seize phones and bring them to the high school office when they see students use their phones. In practice, some teachers seize phones while others only tell students to put them away.
Fox declined an interview but emailed the Bit and said her goal in the meeting was to have a conversation with the council about student engagement. She also said she did not propose mandatory phone storage nor call for any imminent change.
Khuzami said she did not want phone storage to be mandatory and said students should be trusted to follow the policy in its current form. “GDS really needs to put trust in the students about how they’re handling the phone policy,” she said.
Killy said the administration has not made any decisions regarding the phone-storage spaces. “There are no definitive conversations that I’m aware of about installing phone lockers right now,” he said.
Since some SSC representatives’ terms will end after SSC elections on Thursday, May 1, Killy is unsure how SSC will continue to be involved in the decision-making process regarding the phone-storage spaces. “It’s kind of hard because SSC’s last meeting as SSC is next week, so I don’t know how they’ll be involved because there’s gonna be a turnover,” he said. The representatives for the 2025-2026 school year will have their first meeting on Monday, May 12.
Freshman representative Elliott Etter thought phone-storage spaces could be useful to students. “It would lower people’s usage of screens, because it’s obviously an addiction among teens,” he said. Etter also said he thought an optional storage system would be more effective than a mandatory one, but it would depend on the way the school would enforce the system.
Both Etter and sophomore representative Willa Wible referred to the logistical and medical problems that could come with mandating phone storage during the day. “From a medical perspective, if someone has diabetes and they need to check their phone to regulate themselves, I can see how that could be a large threat,” Etter said.
Wible said the phone storage idea was not yet well thought out enough. “What if you want to leave campus? What if there is an emergency and you want to make a call? I think there’s a lot of times where they haven’t really figured out all that stuff,” she said.
In the meeting, Fox said students’ access to phones isn’t helpful in emergency situations such as lockdowns where students need to be quiet, because phones could potentially make noise. She said in the case of personal emergencies, a faculty member could reach a student in-person about an issue rather than a direct phone call from a student’s phone to their family.
Sophomore Rebecca Noland said phone-storage spaces would not help students develop phone-regulation habits. “I don’t think it would be a good long-term solution, because it would simply teach people now that they shouldn’t have their phone when they’re told not to have it, and so then when you go to college, it’s not like you’ve built up any skills for self-controlling,” she said.
In the meeting, Fox also said many students have requested for the school to hold assemblies in the Forum, as they had done until the end of 2023. She also asked representatives what they thought assemblies in the Forum could look like. Fox referred to the 2024 Association of Independent Maryland and DC Schools accreditation mandate that called on the school to move high school–wide gatherings out of the Forum. The association accredits member schools every ten years. She called the capacity limits “a very real thing,” but did not specify any plans to conform to those limits if assemblies were moved back to the Forum.
While the majority of representatives said they thought the Forum was a preferable space to hold assemblies because of its intimate nature, several agreed that the Forum was too small to comfortably hold the whole high school. The council suggested that if students in other grades were to sit in the sophomore seating area—which is the biggest section of the Forum—students would be able to fit more easily in the Forum.
Several students said the gym made them feel more disconnected from the GDS community than they felt in the Forum. Wible said assemblies in the Forum were “really fun because it felt like you were really close with everyone. You could see a bunch of people; you felt much more surrounded by the GDS community.”
Khuzami said if assemblies take place in the Forum again, she wants to focus on making the assemblies “as comfortable as possible” because of the limited space.
Junior Paul Alle-Koffi said assemblies in the Forum would be much more comfortable than assemblies in the gym. He said he would prefer assemblies in the Forum “especially because the seats in the gym are so bad.”
Killy said the accreditation mandate and its accompanying capacity limits in the Forum make holding assemblies in the Forum difficult and maybe not possible. He described other problems with the Forum, such as accessibility and the audience’s ability to see speakers. “As much as we might want to go back to the Forum, there were problems with it, and if we can’t fix those problems, is it worth going back?”