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Education

'Something shifted' since COVID: High school teacher shares the reason why he's quitting

“Part of me feels like I’m abandoning these kids."

via RDNE Stock project/Pexels

Teens taking a selfie at school.


The kids in high school in 2024 have always lived in a world where smartphones exist. Many were raised on iPads and given smartphones by the time they started middle school. During this time, research has begun to reveal the dangerous effects smartphones have on young people; now, teachers and students are forced to cope with the harmful effects of this social experiment.

A recent Speak Up survey found that 80% of teachers think phones distract students and 70% of administrators say it is difficult for students to manage their smartphones responsibly.

Mitchell Rutherford, 35, a high school biology teacher at Sahuaro High School in Tucson, Arizona, is quitting his job of 11 years because his students’ addiction to their phones is making it nearly impossible for him to teach. Rutherford told The Wall Street Journal that something “shifted” in high school kids after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There was this low-energy apathy and isolation,' he told the Wall Street Journal. At first, he thought it was his teaching, but he realized it was the phones. "This year something shifted, and it's just like they are numbing themselves, they are just checking out of society, they're just like can't get rid of it, they can't put it away,” he told KVOA.

Tucson biology teacher quits over students not being able to put down their phones

“Now, you can ask them, bug them, beg them, remind them and try to punish them and still nothing works,” Rutherford told the Wall Street Journal.

Students aren’t allowed to use phones in classes at Sahuaro, but that doesn’t stop them. So, it’s up to the teachers to enforce what feels unenforceable. He says that when he tries to take a phone away from a student they hold onto them for dear life. “That's what an alcoholic would do if you tried to take away their bottle,” he told them.

He likens his students' relationships with their phones to a severe addiction.

"Opioids, obviously a huge problem, cocaine heroin, all of those drugs, alcohol, it's all a big problem, but like sugar even greater than that and then phones even greater than that,” he told KVOA.

He even attempted to give his students extra credit if they reduced their screen time. "Here's extra credit, let's check your screen time, let's create habits, let's do a unit on sleep and why sleep is important, and how to reduce your phone usage for a bedtime routine, and we talked about it every day and created a basket called phone jail,” he said.

But in the end, it was a losing battle for Rutherford and the phones have won.

In February, he told the school that he was leaving the teaching profession to preserve his well-being. "I have been struggling with mental health this year mostly because of what I identified as basically phone addiction with the students."

When asked how parents and school administrators can help fix this problem, his solution is simple: get kids off their phones. “As a society, we need to prioritize educating our youth and protecting our youth and allowing their brains and social skills and happiness to develop in a natural way without their phones,” he told KVOA.

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A community in Arizona rallied together when their neighbor's pet tortoise wandered away from home

Elliot the tortoise had everyone from neighbors to DoorDash delivery drivers looking for him.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

A tortoise can walk quite far.

We've told so many stories about pets escaping from their homes, but this is one you've probably never heard before.

In June, a 150-pound African sulcata tortoise named Elliot got out of his family's yard, setting off a wild goose (tortoise?) chase within his Arizona community. Yes, you read that correctly, a pet tortoise got out and had to be found.

On the morning of June 19, Cindy Iverson went out to her yard after letting her dogs out and discovered that a storm had blown the back gate open. This set up the perfect opportunity for Elliot to escape.

"We panicked," Iverson told PEOPLE. "We looked everywhere. They're so nomadic. They just walk and walk, these tortoises. Once they get out, they can walk miles and miles."

At the time, the weather was very hot, and Iverson and her husband Gary were worried about 12-year-old Elliot's safety. Because of the heat and the tortoise's ability to walk for long distances, Elliot could end up in real danger if he wasn't found quickly. So Cindy reached out to her neighborhood email list and put out the call.

"Immediately, one person replied and said, 'Hey, I lost my turtle a couple years ago, a girl delivering DoorDash saw a tortoise last night, had her dad Google to see if anyone lost a tortoise, and they contacted me,'" she told PEOPLE.

That neighbor told Iverson that the delivery driver had freed Elliot from a drainage ditch. The sighting gave Iverson hope that Elliot would be found. It also showed her that the community was rooting for them and wasn't going to let anything happen to the tortoise. So the Iversons shared the story more widely using NextDoor and the Oro Valley Community private Facebook page.

“The whole community just came together in terms of watching for him. We put up flyers, we put up pictures, stuff on people’s mailboxes. We actually saw a van driving around last night, really slow along with us, trying to find him. So, it was just an incredible outpour of people trying to help us out,” Gary told local television news station KOLD News 13.

The Iversons have had Elliot since he was a baby, and it's clear how much they love him. They could have never anticipated how much their community would show up for them in their time of need. Though they've lived in Arizona for more than 20 years, they're newer to their neighborhood and haven't really had a chance to get to know many of their neighbors. Clearly, that didn't matter when it came to finding their beloved pet.

“It really gives you a sense of community, of friendship and knowing that if this happened to somebody else, we would be right there with them as well, trying to help them out. Oro valley has a really strong community in trying to help each other,” Gary said.

About a day and a half after the Iversons discovered Elliot's disappearance, they got a call that Elliot had been found. He was about a half mile away from home, caught in the fence of a horse farm. Naturally, he was hungry and thirsty, and had allegedly had an encounter with a cactus. But all in all, he was in good shape. Because of where he was situated, the family was unable to use a car to retrieve him, so they decided to cart him home in a wagon.

"He came right to me when he saw me, but we tried to put him in the wagon, and he was having no part of that. So we just pulled the wagon, and he followed us all the way across that property, across the neighbor's property, to our car, and then it took two of us to lift him in the SUV and trot him home," Cindy told PEOPLE. It's good to see he was still ready to walk despite his ordeal.


Elliot's escape showed his owners what community can be. It's really heartwarming to see a whole group of strangers step up and join in to help, even though they didn't have to. Thankfully Elliot is safely home, and the Iversons are planning to reinforce their fence so he can't escape again. We love a happy ending.

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AriZona Iced Tea co-founder refuses to raise price above 99 cents, inflation be damned

The price has held steady since 1992 and Don Vultaggio is determined to keep it that way.

Arizona Iced Tea/Twitter

The price of AriZona Iced Tea hasn't changed in 30 years.

In 1992, a new canned iced tea brand arrived in convenience stores throughout the U.S. The large, Southwest-themed can of AriZona iced tea would set you back $0.99, nearly the cost of a gallon of gas.

I was in high school in 1992. I now have adult children, gas prices are more than quadruple what they were back then and that same can of iced tea costs … $0.99.

The folks at AriZona Iced Tea haven't changed their recommended selling price in 30 years, through various periods of inflation, economic upheaval and a global pandemic. Even now, as COVID-19 and war in Europe is squeezing inflation to uncomfortable places, as even the cost of the aluminum to make the cans is going up, AriZona is refusing to budge on its base price.

Unlike many popular drink brands that are owned by large parent companies such as Coca-Cola or PepsiCo, AriZona is privately owned. That gives the people in charge the ability to make radical financial choices like this.

"I’m committed to that 99-cent price," AriZona co-founder and chairman Don Vultaggio told the Los Angeles Times. "When things go against you, you tighten your belt.

"I don't want to do what the bread guys and the gas guys and everybody else are doing," he added. "Consumers don't need another price increase from a guy like me."

"A guy like me," to be clear, is a company founder worth $4.3 billion who sells around three billion cans of tea per year. So yeah, he really doesn't need to pinch the average American to maximize his profits at this point. However, "don't need to make more money" isn't often a real-world reason for businesses to not try to make as much as they possibly can, regardless of how it impacts consumers.

Of course, most of us don't expect prices to remain steady forever. We expect incremental price increases over time, and don't generally mind as long as we don't feel any drastic changes. But it's definitely refreshing to see businesses that insist on keeping prices low, especially when so many take advantage of inflation news to gouge people unnecessarily.

Take Costco, for instance. You can buy a ginormous hot dog, top it with all the ketchup, mustard, relish and onions your heart desires, and wash it down with a 24-oz soda for a ridiculous $1.50. The meal combo has been the same price since 1985, which resulted in an absolutely epic (and also totally true) tale of Costco founder Jim Sinegal telling Costco CEO Craig Jelinek, "‘If you raise the [price of the] effing hot dog, I will kill you." Rather than raise the price, Costco created its own hot dog manufacturing plant.

AriZona isn't just sitting back and taking the hit, though. One way it's cutting costs is by narrowing the can at the top to use less aluminum, the price of which has gone up due to tariffs in addition to overall inflation.

“If you keep doing those things, you can kind of offset costs and rising costs, and get the consumer value and the ability to buy your product and everybody’s happy,” Vultaggio explained to TODAY.

"Everything (people are) buying today there’s a price increase on," he said. "We’re trying to hold the ground and hold for a consumer who is pinched on all fronts. I’ve been in business a long time and candidly I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on now."

In a world that's experienced so much change and upheaval in recent years, it's nice to know that at least one thing is holding steady—even if it is just a can of iced tea.

(Also nice to now they have a sense of humor about it. Check out their April Fool's Day tweet with their 9 cent mini-can.)

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600,000 kids could've missed a meal with schools closed. But these teachers had a plan.

Arizona provides less funding for schools than it did in 2008 and is ranked 49th in the country for teacher salary.

After months of rising tensions with state lawmakers over low pay and low funding, teachers walked out of schools April 26, 2018. In the second week of the strike, educators weren't backing down and planned to head to the state capitol to continue arguing for higher funding.

But even in the middle of a protest, teachers had their students' needs in mind.

Photo by Andrew Millett Photography.

"My friends and family believe in properly funding our public schools and making sure kids are affected by the walkout as little as possible," said Rodi Vehr, a first-grade teacher at Longview Elementary in Phoenix.

As teachers were preparing for the strike, they were making plans to help their students, too.

Thousands of city leaders and community members across Arizona were opening their doors to provide free or low-cost child care and meal services for the nearly 850,000 students whose schools were closed due to a statewide educator walkout.

Community members throughout the state worked together to plan meals for the 600,000 students who rely on free or reduced-price school meals. According to Vehr, her friends and family pooled their resources to buy and prepare $1,000 worth of meals for students to take home.

"They [legislators] keep saying that children should never be hungry, and we want to help make sure they aren't," Vehr says.

Elaine Glassman and Abbey Johnson crowdfunded money to provide 90 students with meals. Photo courtesy Elaine Glassman.

Elaine Glassman, a first-grade teacher in the Deer Valley Unified School District, put out a call for food donations on social media and was able to prepare meals for 90 students in the district. Glassman works in a Title I School, a federal designation for schools with a high number of students that come from low-income families.

"Sometimes they don’t even have dinner," Glassman says. "They’ll have breakfast and lunch at school, and then not eat until breakfast the next day."

After the first week of schools closures, her school announced it would open its cafeteria from 11 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. to serve students throughout the duration of the walkout. After it became clear the walkout would extend to at least a second week, most of the state’s 1,794 Title I schools arranged for meals to be available to their students as well.

In addition to meals, community organizations are finding ways to provide child care services to keep kids engaged and safe during school hours.

Photo courtesy YMCA Valley of the Sun, used with permission.

Peyton Tune, the chief operating officer for the YMCA Valley of the Sun, announced that its facilities would extend their daycare hours and reduce their prices until the end of the walkout.

"Nobody will be turned away based on an inability to pay," Tune says.

Photo courtesy YMCA Valley of the Sun, used with permission.

Arizona is far from alone in the ongoing battle for education funding.

Teachers in West Virginia were the first to strike this year, and their success — a 5% raise for all teachers in the state — inspired educators in Oklahoma (which secured a funding raise, too) Colorado, and Arizona to follow suit. The recent strikes are emblematic of America's larger issues with how it funds schools and how students and teachers lose when that funding isn't enough.

While they’ve expressed how much they miss teaching and working with their students, Glassman and Vehr say they’re committed to walk out of their schools and proudly wear their #RedForEd until their schools receive funding.

Until that happens, they have one message for students, families, and fellow educators: Stay strong.

Photo by Jeisenia Estrada.

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