Pokemon Go is having little to no impact at high schools within the Lambton Kent District School Board so far.
Superintendent of Secondary Student Success Mark Sherman says apart from a few kids chatting about it in the halls, they haven't seen any disruptions.
"I checked with a couple of principals, north and south, just to see because personally I hadn't heard of any disruption at the school level or any safety concerns and it seems to be a non issue, a non starter at the schools," says Sherman. "We're wondering if perhaps it's because it rolled out in the summer and students got it out of their system or whether it's just a minority percentage of students that are interested in playing with that application."
Sherman says even though most secondary school students have mobile devices, only a small percentage will want to use it for the Pokemon Go app.
"They might like to tweet, they might like to Snapchat, but playing that particular game online is only going to be of interest to a few students out of every hundred," he says.
Sherman says it helps that schools don't appear to be hot spots for the digital creatures.
"I have an 18-year-old son who's off to university. Just through his experience in the summer, he doesn't go out of his way to find sites. It's more like we're travelling around and 'Hey! There's one 400 ft away. I think I'll go collect it,'" he says. "But, again, most of those are going to be in major business centres and geographically the schools are not sites where there loaded with lots of options for them to pick up various characters."
Sherman says students have been very respectful playing the app on their own time so they've had a really good start to the year.
The Pokemon Go app sends players searching for digital creatures that pop up on smartphone screens as they move through real-world locations.