The Cellular Division

There exists a great deal of literature about cell phone tower emissions and their health effects. I was not able to draw a decent conclusion based on any of my reading. I believe researchers don’t have a clue. The science we have does not study the effects of the emissions towers with anything but health survey models. We will have limited understanding of the issue until long after the effects of these towers can be proved using the current research models. It is for this reason I come to the table with a different approach. I decided that I thought the risk was too great and the school needs to shed its tower before I started arguing. The phone company provided me with all the ammo I need.

The facts that are provable are as follows:
1. One Portland school houses a cell phone tower.
2. Concerns over the safty of this have been raised by citizens, parents, teachers, and children.
3. At the current moment we cannot prove towers cause health issues with any real degree of certainty.
4. The cell phone company gives the school money to keep its tower there.
5. Parents have said they do not want businesses that do not have the most ethical business pracitices out of schools.

The scientific argument would not get results from the community. I enlisted the business models of the Cingular Company to help me prove my point. I have been using a cell phone for five years, have never had an unpaid bill and have excellent credit. I am a great customer. They have told me they value my business on repeated occations. I believed them.
Recently my phone stopped receiving messages so I called the nice people at Singular to get them to trouble shoot. They were quite helpful at first. They fixed the problem easily while I was on the phone with them. I thought nothing of this until later.
The problem kept coming up, my phone would not receive messages in real time, the phone dropped calls, all the messages would get erased including one of my baby’s heartbeat. I was a bit irrated. I called Singuliar to find out what they were up to. They said it was just some malfunctions of my primitive phone. They offered to fix the glitches. They insisted I talk to some other people in sales. They thought I wanted to buy a phone. I told them no thank you.
Over the next week the problems continued to occour. There were many messages missed I lost my recording of my greeting, it sucked. I was very upset because they had sworn up and down it was just a limited malfunction not anything serious.
Just as I had about reached my patience limit one of their sales reps called. He had a great deal for me if I would just sign into a new contract. He offered to give me the most excellent phone and all I would have to do is continue doing business with them for the next two years. I became very suspitious at this point. They knew about all the malfuntions a bit too well. I started calling a few friends with identical plans. My friends were very hard to phone. It seems everyone who has a digital phone in Portland has not been getting very good service. The people I did reach had just signed into new two year contracts beacuse their phones were not working so well. I looked into it quite a bit and found that I was not alone. Singuliar had been up to something right under my nose. They had made their old phones harder to use so everyone would have to get new phones.
Those of you who know me, know that I get mad at injustice. This kind of thing makes my blood boil. I called them and confronted them for more than two hours. I asked to speak with executives, supervisors and anyone who would listen. It was awful and made me very irratated and frustrated. They were horrible.
This of course brings me back to the phone message, not the ones that I missed while my cell was out of commission, rather the one we are sending our city’s kids when we do business with this kind of business.
Sing-You-Liar is what I urge all of you to demand Cingular to do. They have pulled the wool over the cities eyes for long enough. We should make them own up to their dishonesty. We need to show our children there is no place in our educational system for people who do not play fair. Cingular is a monopoly who is abusing their power. They are a bully, a liar, and a tyrant and we have their tower on top of our schools.
Now maybe you think I am full of it and that I just need to stop whining and get a new phone plan. If you are part of this camp let me provide you with some more reasons to not do business with phone companies in our schools.

1. Cell phones are used in class for texting which is very distracting.
2. Texting is not used to educate.
3. Kids paying for their own cell phones have to work more and thus have less study time.
4. Cell phones are used as everything but educational tools in schools.
5. Teachers do not want kids using their cell phones in class.

This whole phenomenon points to a problem in our schools. Why are we allowing the companies that contribute to conduct bad business. We have said nothing. “Yes give me a minute fraction of what you are earning and expose my children to wavelengths whose health effects are unknown so they can distract eachother during class with text messages not about school.
We need to revise our strategy.
Wireless web access for schools is a natural alternative.
If students and teachers with computers were provided with wireless access they could use them for learning related topics. If the school were to install wireless access to the school they could control it. That mean they could filter out distractions and show kids how the internet can be used as a source for quick information about school related topics.
Out with the old in with the new, only this time, on our terms.