Restless students have always figured out low-tech ways to drive their teachers to distraction – whether it’s passing notes in class, yakking with their friends or shooting spit wads out hollowed-out ends of ballpoint pens.

But in recent years, high technology has managed to exacerbate the consequences of the timeless impulse to misbehave. Now students – an estimated 79 percent of whom own cell phones – can also text-message their friends, listen to downloaded tunes and snap photos of their classmates and teachers during class.

Fortunately, last week AT&T announced it’s offering new parental controls for cell phones. These new features allow parents to limit their children’s calling hours at certain times of the day, restrict text messaging and even block calls to certain numbers and visits to particular Web sites.

As humans turn to technology for solutions, we must increasingly call on it to remedy the problems it’s helped create.

Yet human beings still hold the most power. A Spokane school administrator says local teachers have become more adept at enforcing policies against classroom distractions. Lewis and Clark High School, for example, prohibits cell phone use in class, but teachers rarely need to confiscate a student’s phone, says Jon Swett, executive director of teaching and learning. When they do, parents are asked to stop by the school to pick up the phone. That gets one more adult involved in helping to set the limits.

For all the extra distractions these phones cause, few families would want to do without them. They provide an extra layer of security in an uncertain world.

When schools have to close their doors in an emergency – whether it’s because a blizzard’s raging outside or a gun’s been found inside – students can quickly call their parents. When it’s late and dark and the football team’s just pulled into the school parking lot – or the kegger’s turned out not nearly as much fun as it sounded – teens need a ride right now.

Thanks to cell phones, kids and parents can feel safer knowing home’s just a speed dial away.