North Carolina middle schoolers had their mirror privileges revoked after they spent too much time in the school bathrooms filming TikTok videos.
The Alamance-Burlington School System announced this week that Southern Alamance Middle School resorted to removing the restroom mirrors to cut down on distractions.
Some students were caught cutting class and visiting the bathroom up to nine times a day.
“Students were going to the bathroom for long periods of time and making TikTok videos,” Les Atkins, the public relations officer for the school system, told WFMY.
The mirrors, Atkins explained, were heavily featured in videos the middle schoolers were filming for the app.
Although an atypical punishment, the penalty seems to have already done the trick.
“Not as many visits to the bathroom, not staying as long and students are held accountable and then when there’s accountability you see a great difference,” Atkins said.
The school district has also implemented a digital hall pass system, which will allow students to check in and out of class — allowing the school to track how much time students are spending outside of the classroom.
The “adjustments” are just another step toward the district’s new goal of teaching the kids about what it’s calling “digital citizenship.”
“We’re trying to educate students: we all have cell phones now. We have to learn to use them. We have to learn when to put them down,” Atkins said.
The crackdown comes just months after multiple US tech experts warned that Gen Z would grow increasingly addicted and reliant on TikTok.
The mindless scrolling associated with the social media app would develop into a dependence, they argued.
Montana became the first state to ban the app last year, claiming they were saving their citizens from “Chinese Communist Party surveillance.”
