for those looking to incorporate this feature, I’ve taken a new approach from the model end of things. Being that all fields are required to be filled out in order for the user to submit and not receive an error alert, I gave the “Submit One” option a default value of nothing. You can take a look at the following code to see how I did that.
<%= f.select :phone_type, options_for_select([["Select One", ""], "Cell", "Work", "Office", "Home", "Other"]), :class => 'genForm_dropBox' %>