OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (KOKH) — When the law went into effect to require schools to create a cell phone policy for the upcoming school year, it came with a grant program to help with funding.
The grant program was administered through the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.
The application opened up on July 1, the same day the cell phone policy law took effect.
The OEQA Executive Director tells FOX 25, 91 districts applied for the Cellphone-Free Schools Grant Program, and 86 of them received funds to help them implement a policy.
OEQA ultimately gave out a little more than half a million dollars of state-appropriated funds.
“Because of the new cell phone policy, schools are needing to determine how they’re gonna meet this policy and ensure that it’s effectively implemented for all schools. And so, this grant is to help them start being able to get that support to buy the things they need to implement that,” said OEQA Executive Director Megan Oftedal.
Any Oklahoma public school district serving middle or high school students was able to apply for the grant if it had implemented a board-adopted policy and was committed to keeping that policy for three consecutive school years beginning this year.
Each district filled out an application detailing what they wanted to use the funds for.
“So are they going to implement a locker solution or a pouch? Another area was how they are planning to implement it. So, a lot of details there, we received things like if they’re going to require everybody put their phone in a storage solution or if they’re going to focus only on students who are repeatedly taking their cell phone out and other circumstances like that,” Oftedal said.
Districts could receive up to 50% of the per-student cost with a maximum reimbursement of $20 per student.
In total, no district could receive more than $50,000.
“That policy is not geared towards elementary… students but to middle and high school students. So we pulled the number of middle and high school students and the reason for that was that we wanted to have districts have a little bit of skin in the game and contribute some portion of the money… so it can go farther and reach more districts,” Oftedal told FOX 25.
Each district that received a grant will have to submit a short report by November 1, which will include uploading invoices, to ensure that the money was spent on what it was supposed to be spent on.
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