One of the most common reason that parents like their kids to keep their phones with them at school is so that in the case of an emergency, their kids can call them. However, in an emergency situation, cellphones can sometimes create as many problems as they solve. Phone systems are only designed to take so many signals at once and too many signals can cause the system to crash. Take the recent earthquake in Virginia for example; as many people hurried to call their friends and family the cell and landline systems were down for up to an hour. For a short time this created mass panic and people thought cell towers and telephone poles were knocked down by the earthquake. In the case of an emergency like this it could render the school’s phone system useless if hundreds of kids start making calls all at once. (Rush) Not only can cell phones escalate emergencies in school they can even cause them, students have been known to call in bomb threats in order to get out of class. Last year Jefferson had a bomb threat, the entire school was evacuated and the hazmat team had to search the school. All of that started because of a post on Facebook by a disgruntled student who didn’t want to go to school that day. If a student has their phone on at school when a classmate or teacher makes them angry they could make a post like this; sending the school into a frantic state of emergency. Although the student would later be expelled for the bomb threat but if phones weren’t allowed in the first place cases like this could be prevented, saving valuable class time.