Future of focus: Pioneering distraction-free schools with Dr. Grant Rivera

When it comes to thinking about schools and technology and our kids, and it just sometimes it's easy to get kind of dragged down. Host Joey Odom sat down with Dr. Grant Rivera, superintendent of Marietta City Schools, to explain how he is tackling technology distraction in the classroom - and why we can be hopeful for the future. Rivera’s innovative use of locked pouches for phones and smartwatches has significantly enhancing student focus and engagement across 2,100 middle schoolers. Learn about the positive changes in classroom behavior, the community's strong support, and strategies for helping students manage tech responsibly. If you’re concerned about digital distractions affecting education, this inspiring story offers practical solutions for reclaiming student attention in the digital age. 

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Transcript

Grant Rivera  0:00  

The challenge is just we have it. We have, at some point, lost hope that this was bigger than what we could control, and I just don't believe that's the case. I believe that we as a village of caring adults can figure this out and guide children in a way where we don't have to be victims or puppets to a cell phone or social media.

Joey Odom  0:22  

Well, welcome back to the Aro Podcast. Hey, it's your good friend, Joey Odom, co founder of Aro. And I know there's so much negativity or pessimism or maybe even hopelessness when it comes to thinking about schools and technology and our kids, and it just sometimes it's easy to get kind of dragged down. But today, I have a conversation with somebody in education that is going to give you so much hope, and maybe even maybe even a little bit more than hope, maybe this feeling that you can run through a brick wall. And that is all thanks to our guest today, Dr Grant Rivera. Dr Rivera is the superintendent of Marietta city schools, a public school in Atlanta, Georgia, a very diverse student population, and he has done something pretty drastic at their school, and you're going to love to hear about their approach. So this week's conversation and next week's conversations are with educators who are doing something about technology in their schools. So Dr Rivera talks very practically about what they've done, but he really gets near the end, he gets in such a sweet spot of hope. And I got excited. I got very fired up. I think you're gonna get very, very fired up. And the contrast this week and next week is this week Dr Rivera is a public school. Next week is with the leader of a private school, and both of them are taking the technology problem very, very seriously, knowing how it's impacting education, and they're doing something about it. So this week's conversation with Dr Rivera was fantastic. I can't wait for you to hear it. What I want you to do right now is just sit back, just relax and enjoy my conversation with the run through a brick wall inspirational. Dr grant Rivera of Marietta City Schools. 

Dr grant Rivera, it is so good to see you. Been really, really excited for us to chat today. Thank you for joining us on the Aro podcast.

Yeah, I'm honored to be with you. Joey

Thank you so grant. You are you had you're the superintendent of Marietta City Schools. For the listener, will you kind of give some orientation on size, number of students, all that kind of stuff of who you were leading? Yeah, sure thing. So we're located just north of Atlanta. Marie to City Schools has 12 campuses, 12 schools and just under 9000 kids. Very diverse district. 67% free, reduced lunch. 39% Hispanic, 35% African American. Just beautiful diversity and amazing families and staff that's great. And how many staff are within Marietta city schools?

So we have a total of 1400 across all of our campuses in central office.

Wow. Okay, so we were talking a little bit off air, and I want to, I want to do this on air again. And then thank you for your leadership, because I view you as a very forward thinker here, as a leader. And my goal for people listening here is to hear what you are doing, the way that you're approaching technology and phones in Marietta city schools, and then think, Okay, what could work for me? Because I think a lot of people need confidence to do something. But before we get to all that Grant, I want to ask you, you you noticed at some point, and it may have been years ago. It may have been slow, insidious. It may have been all at once, but you you noticed something didn't feel right, something was wrong, specifically when it came to phones, technology in the classroom. Will you tell us a little bit about that journey of that feeling of dis ease?

Grant Rivera

Yeah, certainly. So I think you know, and I joined this podcast as certainly a superintendent of 9000 kids, but also a parent of two children, an elementary school and third grader, my third grade daughter, and then my sixth grade daughter. But this story for me, and if you will, this just yearning to do something different and lead something different, really started back in 2020, and I'll I remember I went to a bar mitzvah in Seattle, and I was sitting with all my college friends as one of our kids was celebrating with Bar Mitzvah, and all the moms were sitting around a table talking about how they wanted to convince their kids to sign an agreement that would prevent them they would all agree that they would not log into social media until they were 16. And the moms were just hoping they could get enough momentum and enough, if you will, commitment from all the other kids and boys and girls in the friend group that maybe their kid would feel less compelled to want to go into a phone and social media. And at that time, I was thinking to myself, This is ridiculous. It's taking a conversation at a bar mitzvah to motivate people, and they're hoping they get enough of a bubble around their child where their child won't feel as if they're missing out on have FOMO. And I came back to Marietta in 2020 and I started to socialize this with families and with staff, and candidly, got a ton of pushback, and COVID hit. I put it on ice, but it stayed with me every day since. So as we opened up this particular school year, we just decided we were going to do something different.

Grant Rivera  5:00  

Part of that is around what we were doing in schools, but the other part of that is, what are we doing to inform and empower families, and what are we doing to help educate children? It certainly goes far beyond just what happens during the school day. It's actually how we make our homes an extension of the school. Interesting is when it came to the kids. I mean, you've been in education for a long time. So what effect did you begin seeing where it was even why it even needed to be a conversation at the bar mitzvah? Why was it and maybe this is so basic a question, maybe we're so beyond and recognize the impact. But what did you see as an educator when you said, Okay, this is actually having a material impact on the kids and their development and their learning, or whatever it was. So what was it that you saw that you said, Okay, we actually need to do something. Yeah, but I think your point is, and the question is spot on, because, truth be told, this thing has just evolved right in front of us, and we don't even realize. And I think for many people, be it educators or parents, we just came to accept this tsunami that was happening, and yet we accept it as normal. And I think maybe that's where what I was feeling, quite honestly, as a parent of a child who was in elementary school, and kids are starting to get phones, and then now as a sixth grader, there's just a lot of conversations around my dinner table about I want a phone, and I sometimes felt like I was fighting this alone. But I think as a superintendent, it was easy. All you had to do was walk into a classroom and sit for 30 minutes and watch teachers say, Put your phone away. Put your phone away. Put your phone away. Or situations where we walk through the cafeteria and kids aren't talking, they're staring at their phones, or kids walking down the hallways like zombies. They're not interacting with one another. And I think, if anything, as superintendent, every year, I have the honor of handing out 600 high school diplomas. I bet half of those kids shake my hand and don't even look me in the eye. So while I'm not trying to fix every dynamic of society, I think there was a as an educator, we saw this, this evolution over time that we just came to accept. But truth be told every one of us, if we stop for a moment and said, Is this the kind of classroom, school interactions, dynamics, relationships that we want our kids were addicted. And I think that's what was compelling for me, is to say at some point, enough, enough, wow.

Joey Odom  7:16  

And it's a dumb question. I don't want to be overly reductive either, and I'm not trying to paint you into a corner here on this. But when you think of those that the kids not making the eye contact with you, and certainly the teacher is saying, Put your phone down, that one's obvious. But is the trace back? I mean, is the common thread in all of this? Is it truly phones? I mean, sometimes I wonder, I'll ramble through my question here, but sometimes I wonder, are we just being too simplistic or reductive, or is this, this actually seems to be really the common thread. Is that for you, when you say, Okay, if we solve this, this solves a huge amount of these problems that we're seeing, or at least the cascading effects from them. Yeah, so let me acknowledge that I'm not a child development expert. I'm just an educator with 25 years and someone who cares deeply for children and their well being. For me, if we thought about a cell phone as a brick and mortar building, none of us would let our kids walk inside of it,

Grant Rivera  8:11  

whether it's whether it's violence, whether I mean all of that, if you think about a cell phone as a brick and mortar building, would we ever allow our kids to walk into that with unfettered access? Never, never. I mean, there are things that I could put, I could put a Google search on my phone right this second and find kids that would shock me as a 49 year old dad and superintendent, I don't want my 11 year old exposed to that. So to answer your question, do I think it's only the phones, not exactly, but I think the phones are the gateway. Do I think that phones provide access to social media where I don't want my 11 year old, or, for that matter, any of my 9000 kids judging their well being based on an Instagram or Snapchat filter? Absolutely. So I think the phone is the vehicle. The phone is not the only dynamic that we have to address as educators and caring adults, but it certainly is the way in which this can get to children. Again, I don't minimize, you know, laptops and other types of things and what kids can do on other types of devices, but right now, it is a gateway to things that we don't want our kids exposed to. And even as you think about it, as I mean, you mentioned this earlier, just as a practical impediment to learning. It's like you have a teacher explaining, you know, the French Revolution versus all the coolest things you could possibly think of on your phone. Like, that's a pretty easy to answer. Which one I'd want to look at, right? The French Revolution. No kidding. Like, obviously, so it's the internet, by the way. I had to laugh inside thinking about the brick and mortar. You may not have watched Chappelle Show. You are smarter than I am, but, like, the Chappelle Show was a, you know, great show in the 90s and 2000s and there, there was one sketch he had there once, where it was if the internet were a shopping mall. And so he actually had, like, an illustration of that. And it is a, an absolutely terrifying thought. Oh, for sure. Yeah, absolutely well, and think about So, let's go back to your French Revolution example from.

In it. I've read National Research says the average middle school gets 237 notifications a day on their phone,

most of those coming from Snapchat or discord. That's where I say I didn't know what discord was. I had to go ask a middle schooler, and I was like, I lost so much credibility. But if you think about it, the teachers are, I mean, they're the smartest people in the world have developed algorithms to suck us in as adults, and we have more of a developed brain than the adolescent brain. So as you think about all those distractions constantly pinging throughout the day, and then you think about everything else that could be introduced by kids who have an undeveloped brain and who are at times immature in the things that they do, we just have to put up. We need kids to focus on the French Revolution and their relationship. Their relationship with adults. We don't need the distractions that come as a result of the internet, the social media, the temptation and all those things. Wow. So you decided to do something about it, and I like the I like what you've done with it, because to me, it's a little bit of I'll have you explain it. But to me, what I like that you've done about it. I believe that you've chosen the really the most, like, the pivot point, the most vulnerable age, where, like, Okay, we got to get it right at this age. Will you tell the listener, what have you done about it at Marietta city schools? And I want to hear a little bit about that process. Was that a difficult thing to push? If you look at the school, school board vote, it didn't look very difficult, but I'd love to hear about the difficulty in undertaking what you did. So in Marietta city schools, we have two middle schools, we have a sixth grade academy, and we have a seventh and eighth grade, more traditional middle school. Those two schools, those two different campuses, serve 2100 kids in Marietta, we decided that we would start with middle school. We didn't touch elementary because we felt as if, when you have one homeroom teacher, you can, you can control that a little bit better. It's been interesting to hear the number of questions I've got. When are we going to take it down to elementary? I you know, I don't know how the answer that question right now, but that's a dynamic. We did not start at high school because some of those kids are more addicted. People start to rationalize, I got to have my phone for work for this or whatever the case may be. We started in middle school where we knew that we could pull this back a little easier, because not 100% of the kids have phones. And we really think about this year as a pilot year. What did we do we during the school day? And I think it's important to understand this is not about just what we did during the school dates, but what we're doing across 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but during the school day, during the time that we have with kids, as they enter the building, they will go to first period. It's pledge moment of silence, morning announcements, just like every other school in the country, and there's an automated message that says, kids, please turn off your cell phones and your smart watches. Place them in a yonder pouch. Teachers distribute the pouches in first period, kids put their watches and their cell phones away. Why do we say smart watches? Because they have similar functionality, and then at the end of the day, they will unlock. Teachers will unlock those pouches. Kids will take out their cell phone and their smart watch. They will go home. We keep the pouches and we do the whole thing the very next day. So for us, it was about acknowledging that we want to do this once a day, not every period. We do not want the burden on top of teachers having to every single period police this kids come in in our building, and we're now in in the fourth week of school, they are extremely conditioned. They pull it out, they put it on their desk, they get a pouch, they lock it up, we move on with the day. So it's really become very well socialized across our 2100 kids in three grade levels. And I think there's incredible potential to talk about what this means for the future. Quite honestly, in Marietta, we have not made the decision yet today on what we're going to do next year for high school, but what I know is that if I can socialize the entire eighth grade class now next year, when they're ninth graders, I've got a quarter of the school already conditioned to an expectation that we established. That we established the year prior. So for us, it was a very intentional rollout to make sure we did it right, because the operations and logistics matter. We cannot look stupid to staff, to kids or to families because we didn't do it right, and that's why we chose to start in middle

school. The why is pretty simple. It's I want to be more present and engaged with my kids. And I had tried multiple interventions myself. I tried the iOS screen time, and I tried to just put my phone in my room. I tried to even lock it in like a safe so I didn't have access to it. But, you know, it was like it was always calling me back, and it was all, there was always a reason to go back there. It was the combination for me with the RO being, being something that I could just go put it away in and forget it. And then I really do. I'm incentivized by, you know, by reaching goals. You know, I'm a, I'm a creature of habit. I'm a goal setter. I like to reach some of those goals, and the gamified piece of that ro adds to it. I think really did call to me as well. And that was that was that extra layer that I needed. I mean, I've been able to put my my phone away in my room, but still called to it with this. It was like I wanted to reach some of the goals. And I think that helped me really kind of shift my mindset, to be able to then, you know, focus on what I need to do and put that phone away. We love hearing stories from the RO community. The one you just heard actually comes from.

Joey Odom  15:00  

Voices of Aro episodes where I sit down with Aro members and they share about their stories and their lives with Auro. Make sure to check out the Voices of Aro episodes. And if you remember who would like to share your own story with Aro, please email us at stories@goaro.com

Joey Odom

What kind of pushback Did you hear from, whether it's from parents, students, staff, what was what did you hear on all and and when I say pushback, it could be you were used the term rationalization, whether it's true, pushback like this is the dumbest idea ever, or if it were, if it was just rationalizations, like all the what ifs, what kind of feedback did you hear in when you said, Hey, we're going to do this.

Grant Rivera

So Joey, this is where I was caught most by surprise. So just to give our listeners a quick sense, in May of 2024, we announced publicly that we wanted to pursue this one year pilot across Middle Grades. When we did that, we immediately announced in person, Staff family meetings, in person, student meetings, virtual meetings across all three stakeholders, staff, families and students. We put out surveys as we did that over the next two and a half months leading up to the start of school, August, 1 in 2024 there was not a single middle school parent who contacted me and said, Don't take my kid's cell phone. Not one.

Wow, not one.

Grant Rivera

Not a single staff member, not a single parent. And in fact, the overwhelming feedback that I got from families was my kid has been wearing me out to get a cell phone, and now you've just taken away this. You've really taken the oxygen out of the conversation, because I'm not going to give them a cell phone because they don't even want they can't have one at school. And families were saying, Thank you, because we were actually alleviating the pressure and the conversation that was happening at home during that in two and a half months, and still to this day, several months later, after this announcement in May, I've only had one parent say, You shouldn't take my kids smart watch. My humble opinion is they didn't understand the functioning functionality of a smartwatch, because if they did, there'd be no issue. But honestly, and that's what shocked me the most, I assumed I'd get worn out, but instead, there has not been a single complaint by a single parent. 100% of the staff have been like this. Has changed our classrooms. We went back 20 years. Now we did some things intentionally because of how the feedback I got back in 2020 the biggest thing that we factored into was, how are we going to allow teachers to unlock magnets in the event of an active shooter or an emergency? That was a conversation I too quickly dismissed back in 2020 and yet, now that we learn, we have a plan for it. But once we manage that dynamic, and we managed, hey, I've got to get a message to my kid, once we factored all those things in, then honestly, the fear and anxiety by parents haven't had a single complaint since May.

Joey Odom

I don't want to get by the way, that is shocking. I was I again, I saw that the board, the board approved it seven zero, but that doesn't mean parents would. And by the way, you hear all this, oh, the biggest, the biggest impediment, is parents. That is what you just told me, is shocking. And so I That sounds like a little bit of a false narrative that parents are the ones against it, because this is, I want to say this, well, this is not a, this is not a suburban, you know, suburban private school with, you know that people spend $30,000 to go to, this is a public school, and you're hearing that from families who want the best for their kids. So that is actually shocking. I'd love to the question, the biggest question I hear a lot now, in addition to, well, parents push back, is the, you know, the unthinkable active shooter situation. So you said that is something you've managed. Can you tell us a little bit? How about how you manage that tension there? Yeah.

Grant Rivera  18:39  

So let's acknowledge two realities, two competing realities. If you talk to any expert in crisis management, any first responder we partner with, married to police department, they have an expertise in how to manage these types of situations. If there's an active shooter, the last thing the police department or any first responder wants is for a child to be on their phone. Why? Two reasons. One, we don't want to draw further attention to kids who might be trying to hide from an active shooter and being on a cell phone would do such, and two children are interrupted and distracted from focusing on the directions of an adult who's been trained when they're trying to talk to their parent on the phone. So let's acknowledge that an expert in this space is going to say, I don't want phones anywhere. But also, let's be honest, enough that families see these tragedies occur across the country far too often, and it is important to a family to at least believe they could reach their child in the event of a crisis, and specifically an active shooter. So we decided that we were just going to take the oxygen out of that conversation, and we were going to acknowledge and honor the feedback from families, and do it in a way that our staff still had the ability to be safe and directive in the event of a emergency such as an active shooter. So what we did in Marietta and and to the best of my knowledge, we may be one of the only school districts across the country to do this, as we talked with yonder.

And others, there has been no other model that we had to follow. We just built our own because I learned the lessons from 2020 but specifically what we did was we purchased it almost looks like a hotel safe. We mounted it in every classroom, in the spot where kids would be would would run and hide during an active shooter. So there strategies around that about where kids would go in a classroom. It's usually not within the direct line of sight of a direct line of sight of a school, of a door, window or otherwise. So we have that box mounted teachers every day. Right now, when we dismiss at the end of the day, we'll go unlock that, if you will, hotel safe. It's actually a key box with a code on it. They unlock that safe. That box, they pull the magnet out. In less than a minute, they unlock every magnet, every pouch in their classroom, and they put it back in the event of an active shooter. We told our teachers, you do what is safe for your children. And if you're in a position where you can unlock or, for example, if there was a fire, get out of the building, then we have the opportunity to unlock those are very simple things that adults understand. But what we did was we told families, we have the ability for your teacher to unlock the pouch when it is safe to do such that is very different than the family that imagines every kid has to exit the building before they can unlock their pouch, and they say, Well, my kid could be stuck in a building for hours. So again, we acknowledge the competing dynamics, which is first responders may have one recommendation, families may have a preference for something different, and truth be told, we just wanted to try to land this thing in the middle where we did something safe, but also we acknowledge that that's a very real concern for families, and I didn't want that dynamic to sink the vision that we have for reimagining schools that are both cell phone free and smart watch free. Well, I gotta be good for you, because that that's the just because something's difficult, that doesn't mean we should back down from it. And so you're you've said, Okay, let's wade into the gray waters here, and let's figure this out. And good for you. And I hope people listening will say, like, Okay, this is a solvable that's a solvable thing that that we need to address, that you can't ignore, but you also can't just Just Say No to the entire thing, because there's some complications

there. So so I'd like to hear some of the you touched on it, but I'd like to hear some of the early results we are we're late August. You've been in school for not yet a month. So I'd love to hear what are you seeing so far in the in the early days of this pilot. So in our early days of this pilot, I'll share with you anecdotally what I've observed, and then I'll tell you the data we're starting to collect. I think that's very significant. So anecdotally, as I've walked hallways and been to the cafeteria and actually interviewed kids in classrooms, I'll tell you what's been most rewarding for me. We have fewer tardies to class because kids are not distracted by their phones. They're getting to the classroom. The cafeteria was the loudest I've ever heard it in my seven and a half years as superintendent. That's because kids were talking, not staring at their phones. Discipline has been down. Teachers have said students are more engaged in learning. Interestingly, we have partnered with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, which is a large hospital network here in metro Atlanta, as well as Emory University, and we are working with researchers at both of those organizations, children's and Emory, to study the impact of this for students, staff and families. And I'll give you some quick numbers back in May, when our middle school had no limitations on cell phones when we said, your phones can't be out invisible. But we didn't really enforce it. We couldn't enforce it last May in 2024 99% of our middle school teachers would tell you they observed a cell phone during class, a student with a cell phone during class, and 97% of them would tell you that cell phones were a distraction to learning that that that those numbers are shocking, real, but shocking. Now that we have fast forward into the first month of school, we're in the process now of talking to our teachers to get to get additional data points to compare, but I'll tell you, I had a faculty meeting last week, and I said to the teachers, how many of you are seeing cell phones? None. How many of you feel like cell phones are a distraction to learning in their classroom. None. How many of you feel like your classrooms are a completely different classroom than last May, when I asked you, and 100% of the hands went up. So for us, we acknowledge that every single classroom and every single teacher saw this as a distraction to learning in some way, and cell phones were present in their classrooms, and we basically have dropped that down to zero. And are there times when kids try to sneak through this, perhaps, but I'll tell you this, they're not pulling their phones out in classes, because who's going to snitch on you faster than a middle schooler. So

the data was compelling in May, and it's encouraging in August. And I think we are really excited to continue to track this, not just around, whether it's a distraction, but we actually are going to be tracking, you know, what is the impact on learning? What is the impact on their well being? How is this felt by teachers? How is it felt by families? How is it felt by children? There's been some fascinating conversations that I could certainly elaborate more regarding how kids are coping through this, because that's actually been.

Uh, really heavy on my heart, and it's something we didn't anticipate. You get, give, give us a little bit of that. Yeah, so, so it was interesting, and I'll share this story briefly. I had the opportunity to walk into classrooms with an expert from children's health care of Atlanta, and this person has 25 to 30 years of experience, and we were going into interview classes and just asked the man, totally, how are you doing? And as we walked in and out of classrooms, in an eighth grade classroom, I had kids say to me, Hey, like, we don't have a cell phone problem. You didn't have to take my phone. And, I mean, one kid even said, hey, you know, superintendent, I think you need to focus more on the AC. They needed to focus on, you know, on the air conditioning. They needed to focus on my cell phone. Pass. I mean, they were just wearing me out, right? Gave me all the reasons why they didn't think I should touch their phone. And when we walked out of that classroom, this expert said to me, what'd you hear? And I said, Well, I heard a bunch of kids that really don't like me. She was, you know what I heard? I heard they're addicted. And this is what happens when we've taken something away from somebody who's addicted. These were eighth graders in an honors class and and we talked about how we're taking the pouches is actually the easiest. Taking the phones into the pouches is the easiest part about it. What we need to be focused on right now is, how are we helping kids, and how are we giving them coping strategies when they have anxiety and other real consequences from being addicted, from something that we just now took away, and one of the recommendations we got from our partners with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta was we need to be tracking the number of kids who go to the school clinic complaining of a headache or stomach ache, because those are symptoms of anxiety, and while we are providing coping strategies to all kids in classroom, guidance lessons by the counselors, we've got to be tracking specific kids who are showing patterns day after day, because we've got to reach out to these kids, because that withdrawal is real. I'll be honest with you, Joey, we were so focused on executing that I wasn't thinking about those nuances and candidly, they're just as important in the well being of a child as taking their phone, I mean, but this grant, this gets me so fired up in a good way, just excited, because what those those kids thought they were talking you out of this initiative, and they were really strengthening your resolve and saying, This is important, man, we got to get this right. If they're showing signs of addiction, what an amazing opportunity to do something about it. And then why don't we teach them these coping things to help them build resilience of when you go some through something that's difficult, that's going to be a model for them as they carry on the rest of their lives when they face something else that's difficult. So you're teaching to me like you're teaching like such resilience and these kids and something that they're going to come back. I guarantee you, you may have already had it, but you will get these kids to come back and say, Thank you. Yeah, thank you for taking a bold step. Thank you for being a leader. Here one thing that stands out to me, and then maybe this is obvious, but when you talk about, you talked about normalizing for the eighth graders when they go into ninth grade, there's 25% who are conditioned to that. What you're really getting to the real heart of is culture. Culture is the taken for granted, assumptions of the way a group works. And so you're going to the very culture of the school that you're leading, and it's going to permeate throughout the kids. It's going to permeate throughout the staff and their families. And you think about all these effects that it's going to have on these people by making this choice by doing something that is difficult, that requires a lot of complexity, that probably put a lot of work on your desk to get it done. So for someone who's in education, I want to close with this question. For someone who's in education who's listening, they may be a superintendent, they may be the janitor, they may be a teacher, they may be an admin, whatever they are, what kind of encouragement would you give to somebody who's not, maybe, yet taken a step in this direction? What encouragement you give to somebody who is in one of those positions, whether it's leadership or just administer or, you know, just any other staff member on at a school? Yeah, I think it boils down to, I mean, I have two young daughters, and I remember going to frozen two, and the comment was made do the next right thing. And for me, it's about the next right thing. Listen, if there was a child who was hungry, we would feed that child. There was a child who needed clothes, we would provide clothes. There was a child who had a who had dyslexia, we would teach that child to read. We wouldn't turn our back on any child who had a need. That's our responsibility as educators and caring adults, as caring adults in this village that surrounds children. And what we have to acknowledge is that there is a dynamic that has overcome schools and society, our homes and our classrooms, around students and cell phones and social media, and in the same way, we can't turn our back on a child who's hungry and in need. I don't believe we can turn our back on a child's well being and their needs. And I think this conversation, the beautiful thing that has happened is that there are people, and be it ro be it Jonathan Hite, be it others, who have now brought this to the forefront. And we are having more conversations, because so many of us are looking at the generation slightly older than our kids, and saying, I don't want my kid like that. I as adult one, don't want to be addicted like that. And I think that's for me. There has to be a resolve. There has to be a commitment. There has to be a willingness to think through this strategically, because we know what the next right thing is. The challenge is just.

Grant Rivera

Haven't we at some point lost hope that this was bigger than what we could control, and I just don't believe that's the case. I believe that we as a village of caring adults can figure this out and guide children in a way where we don't have to be victims or puppets to a cell phone or social media. And I just I keep that hope. I believe that this is the next right thing. I believe that it's critical for the success of schools and the well being of children. And again, I believe the conversation we're having now it's as important as what we do in a classroom is what we model and instill in hope. And I remain hopeful in the next right thing.

Joey Odom

I'm about ready to run through a brick wall and enroll my kids in Marriott City Schools. I'll tell you that. I mean, Grant, this is I mean, even as you're saying that that got me, that got my emotions stirred up listening to it, because you said something again and again and again and again. I want everybody listen if you don't get anything. But this, it's two words that grant kept saying, which is, I believe, I believe, what if we didn't accept the stuff we see around us as the eventuality. What if we didn't accept the things we read the news about the way our kids are? What if we didn't accept the fact that our kids addicted, are addicted? What if instead said, what grant just said, which is, I believe, God, you got me fired up. Grant, this is fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for being a leader. Thank you for doing. Thank you for not just being leader, but believing. And I think this is inspiration. I know it for me, for others, for people in education, I'm super grateful for you well. I'm humbled and honored to certainly be a part of this conversation, and I joined this very humbly, simply trying to do right by our community, and hopeful that there becomes a larger and larger village that wants to do the same all throughout the country.

Joey Odom  31:41  

Hey, I warned you. I warned you that you would feel hopeful, that you'd be ready to run through a brick wall. How good was Dr Grant Rivera, just inspiring that hope in us. So kudos to him. Kudos to what he's doing. I hope this is something you can forward on to leaders of your school to draw inspiration from each other, see what they're doing at Marietta city schools for Dr Rivera, and inspire others to take drastic action themselves, to do something about this for our kids, for their education and for their futures. Thank you so much for joining us for this week's episode of the Aro Podcast.