Smartphone bans have surged in schools across the country, but many students are lamenting the loss of access to their music in between classes. So, they’ve turned to the technology of yesteryear to fill the gap.
Many students took to the Internet or their parents’ basements to find old music players that they could take to school. Mike Givens, 51, runs a business selling refurbished iPods online, and his sales increased significantly this summer. He sold 68 devices during a single week in the end of July, compared to 22 in the same period last year. He believes young students faced with an impending school phone ban were behind the surge.
“I’ve seen people walking around with CD players, and someone also has a Walkman,” Sebastien Wall, a 17-year-old whose school initiated a smartphone ban this year, told the New York Times. One student in Missouri discovered his mother’s old iPod Nano and was excited to discover Adele music already loaded onto it. And a 16-year-old in New Hampshire ordered a cassette player when he came across a box of his father’s old cassette tapes, so he could play them for his crew team to get them pumped up before practice.
