While the policies are almost uniformly popular, a few observers see a downside. The movement “happened so quickly there wasn’t a thoughtful, nuanced approach” to the problem of helping young people manage digital distraction, said Julia Gustafson, a public health expert who spent five years developing school partnerships for Yondr.

She and partner Shannon Godfrey last year founded , a technical solution to distraction that they believe offers the benefits of a bell-to-bell mobile phone ban that also teaches students how to manage their digital habits and learn skills that give them greater agency without hiding their devices in a pouch.

On its website, The Commons describes itself as “airplane mode for schools,” creating what amounts to a large geofence around a campus that essentially turns off the Internet during the school day. Schools can “whitelist” sites they need, such as Google Classroom, Khan Academy, Duolingo and the like, but others are inaccessible. Students keep their phones with them, but they must adjust the app’s settings to turn individual apps or games on.

Students who look for ways around the system trigger a notification that offers a “nudge,” giving them the opportunity to turn the apps off. If they don’t, alerts go to administrators, who can easily track down the student and address the issue.

At bell time, the geofence deactivates, said Gustafson. When students walk off campus, it deactivates as well. “It’s tier-one social norming,” she said. “Students are building the skills they need every single day, along with their peers doing the same thing. It makes the right choice the easy choice, by automatically silencing those distractions.”

Godfrey, whose background is in ed tech, said the app helps schools minimize distractions while helping students practice “healthier tech habits,” something bans don’t address. The habits, she said “can transfer beyond the school walls” and help students develop life skills that will be valuable as adults. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo talked recently with Gustafson and Godfrey about what they see as the inadequacy of phone-free schools policies and, in Gustafson’s words, how such policies send “a completely mixed message” to kids about the power of technology. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Let’s talk about the phone-free schools movement. I can’t remember the last time I saw something catch fire so quickly and grow so rapidly. I gather that you folks have a slightly different point of view on this in terms of distraction and keeping kids focused on school.

Julia Gustafson: It’s been simmering under the surface for a long time. People have noticed that there’s something wrong with how people are engaging with their phones, but more importantly, the addictive applications that are on the phones. COVID was a catalyst to people waking up and understanding that there truly is something wrong here. Going beyond that, it’s been a movement, both on a parental level and a school level, because we’re seeing teacher attrition rates higher than they ever have been. How can we support our teachers, and how can we support our students and parents getting intimately involved? 

It always takes a little while for research to catch up, and research has now finally caught up. That being said, the way in which it’s being handled, talking about it as bans and prohibition, is a surrender to not understanding what to do about a truly wide-spanning public health topic. A ban or prohibition is action, versus what we were doing before, which is inaction. But no one has really taken a thoughtful approach to thinking about how we can do this differently, with guardrails to support people’s interactions with phones. 

Shannon Godfrey: My background has been in education technology, and so I’ve seen the positive of when tech is used appropriately in the classroom to aid student success. Julia and I together come in with that thoughtful approach. But when you look at some of the research around neuroscience or behavioral science, adolescents haven’t yet developed the skills for self-regulation, impulse control, attention management. And most of the apps that are competing for their attention are intentionally engineered to make it hard to disengage — and that’s something we know adults struggle with too.

So to Julia’s point, this is really a societal problem and a public health issue. But the difference with adults is that we’ve had time and context to develop coping strategies. We’ve developed systems to manage the distractions, and it’s getting more difficult for students to be able to handle that. 

Our “a-ha” moment [was] having experience helping schools go phone-free, and seeing that the short-term, immediate impact was phenomenal, but really talking with schools about the exceptions [that didn’t work]. How do we start to use tech positively when we’re using Duolingo or mobile optimized apps in the classroom? How do we make sure that students are really developing some of the skills beyond the four walls of schools? We are having a lot of these conversations. We need something a little bit more intentional, and I think that is something tech can solve.

Julia, you used the word “surrender” earlier. I’m guessing that you would say a phone-free strategy doesn’t teach the skills of “saying no” and limiting your time on an app — or even learning about what the app is trying to do. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Gustafson: When policymakers are addressing demands from both parents and schools, what they’re lacking is that context in which technology is integral for anyone to be successful now, but also into the future. And so when you ban or prohibit something, that’s sending a completely mixed message to the students that the technology is to be embraced and it’s going to make you a leader — but needs to be locked away. Then we need dual-factor authentication to log into our Chromebooks, and so we take out this “prohibited” device, open it up to use the dual factor authentication — but then are bombarded with 200 notifications from Tik-Tok. So boom, this rebound consumption happens, and you’re locked into that as a distraction, vs. going on your phone, using it as the tool that it was designed to be, and being able to move forward.

I was listening to a radio program about phone-free schools the other day and one of the panelists said that if school is a place where we prepare young people for their life after school, there’s only one kind of job where they ask you to put your phone away: a low-paid service job. Do you have any ideas on that?

Gustafson: That goes back to what I was saying at the beginning: Using technology appropriately is integral to someone’s ability to be a leader in today’s society, so it is a huge mixed message when you’re telling somebody to lock a device away throughout the day instead of actually being able to utilize it when there are practical applications — and denying them that opportunity to learn the right time, place and manner to use that piece of technology. And you can think about that for phones, but you can also think about that for tablets and computers, which can be equally distracting during the school day.

Godfrey: We’ve had the opportunity to meet with students and have focus groups. Students are savvy and they’re smart. A lot of times with phone bans, are we saying that students can’t learn self-regulation and they can’t learn impulse control? When you talk with students, they’re saying, “Hey, I want schools to help me learn self-regulation. I just don’t necessarily agree we should pretend the phone doesn’t exist.” And in our focus groups, we have students come back and say, “Why is it so wrong if I believe the phone is my device of choice? Maybe it’s the only thing I can afford. Maybe it’s just what I’m used to using because they’re so sophisticated now and just readily available. But if I’m using it for academics, and I choose the academic app or to upload my Google Classroom or to submit an assignment or a chat in Google Classroom, why can’t I use my phone for that if that’s the appropriate time? Why can I use my computer in class but not my phone? If you’re helping us learn time, place and manner, then why is the phone so wrong?” You’re almost saying one thing but then asking them to do another. 

Let’s talk about The Commons: If I’ve got a game on my phone that doesn’t need Internet access, I’ve got access to that as well. What’s your thinking on that?

Gustafson: We do track the amount of time students are spending on that on their phone during the school day, so if a student downloads a game that doesn’t need Internet access, we can see on the admin dashboard that Greg has spent two hours on his phone today. That’s a little odd. Let’s go check in and see what the scoop is. So that’s one of the ways that we can try to prevent students from doing that. And then I’ll also just add that The Commons isn’t the school’s cell phone policy. This is a measure that gets inserted into the school cell phone policy to just help make it easier for that right time, place and manner, and for students to comply with it. So if I’m sitting there playing a game for two hours on my phone, I’m sure that someone is going to notice that, and that’s when that policy comes into play.

Turning off the Internet, for lack of a better term, seems like a smart move — with obviously these other sites whitelisted for school use. I guess somebody might squint and say it’s kind of the same thing as putting a phone in a pouch. What’s the difference?

Gustafson: The pouch doesn’t have any guardrails. So if a teacher decides, “Hey, everyone, take out your phone for Duolingo” in language class, it’s unfettered access all over again. You might get 100 notifications. It all comes back. But with The Commons app, you have the guardrails up at all times. You don’t actually need to lock a phone away. You don’t need to spend time taking a phone out of a pouch or getting it or retrieving it, plus it constantly has guardrails on so the focus can always be on the task at hand.

Can you dig in a little bit more deeply? What are students learning?

Gustafson: Behavioral economics really is the science about making the right choice the easy choice, by helping people make decisions that are ultimately the best for them. And so in the case of school, it’s being able to stay off of distracting applications. 

What are you actually learning to do better using this app?

Gustafson: We just interviewed some teachers right before the holiday break. What they were saying is, “We see that students just have more control over their phones. They’re not fiddling with them as much. They have better impulse control.” And that’s a huge win. We talked about behavior change. So much of this is an impulse for people to reach out to their device without actually understanding that they’re doing it until they’re already in their phone. If we can start controlling those impulses and allow people to develop the skill set of controlling their phone use when their phone is still next to them — because that’s the skill they’re going to need when going into college or their career — that’s a huge win for us.

Godfrey: We’re giving them a feedback loop. They’re taking their real device — they don’t have to lock it away and pretend it doesn’t exist — and learning how to manage it in the wild. Our students are recognizing that when I set foot on campus, this is time to put our phone away. It’s sometimes that subtle nudge I need, but it’s helping me build this habit. It’s helping me remember, “Yep, this is school time. This is my time to engage, my time to learn, my time to focus.” 

And it’s been phenomenal. I’m getting better grades, and I’m playing with kids during recess, and we’re checking out basketballs, and I’m noticing my peers are interacting with us, and we’re paying attention to the teachers.

So the phone is sitting in front of me. I don’t have to put it in a pouch. I don’t even necessarily have to put it in my backpack. Yet all the things that I would use it to have fun with aren’t there. They essentially aren’t working. So how am I learning impulse control? 

Gustafson: Because of all the addictive apps on the phone that people are hardwired to reach out to it, even if it doesn’t buzz, even if it doesn’t do anything, sometimes even the sight of it — it’s now wired in my brain that the minute I have a sense of boredom I’m pulling out my phone to cure that boredom. By reducing all of the fun and addictive apps on it, we’re actually helping rewire the brain to not want to continue. 

So it’s saying, “In certain conditions, this phone is not the same kind of machine.” 

Gustafson: If for eight hours during the day when they’re at school, we’ve shifted their brain to understanding that this is a boring device and they have control over it — they have impulse control over that device — they’re now having the awareness to practice those same skills outside the walls of the school. 

One of the appeals of a phone-free school is that it’s very clean and easy for the adults. If every kid’s phone is in a bag, I don’t have to worry about it. What The Commons is doing, in a sense, could make life more complicated for certain adults, having to chase down the kid who’s on Tik-Tok, or using some site they shouldn’t be. 

Godfrey: It’s interesting. From our experience and talking with schools, we see that a lot of programs with pouches roll out really successfully at the beginning, but then there are damages to pouches happening, or students faking a phone into the shoe rack. They’re working the system. Our schools are spending more energy playing Whack-a-Mole, and as those inconsistencies continue to creep up, the fidelity of the program starts to go away. And as the fidelity goes away, students are realizing that they can get away with it. And so then they do.

With our schools, what we’ve been able to do for the first time is actually help focus our administrators on where to put their attention: Where are students actually struggling with being able to put their phone down? Are these students who actually need more support and intervention? And when we also look at grades, attendance and some of these other data points and factors, if the phone is traditionally a root cause to a lot of these problems, how do we really support that student before they get off task and have a greater risk of not graduating?

As of last month, had enacted phone restrictions in K-12 classrooms, with 27 banning phones in classrooms outright. In many cases, schools are asking students to drop their phones in Yondr pouches for the school day, at a cost of about $30 per student annually. 

What you may not know is that the pouches have been floating around for more than a decade, first appearing in an Oakland biker bar — and that the man behind them had thinkers like French philosopher and English novelist on his mind as he developed the idea.

More than a decade later, Graham Dugoni sees the pouches as a low-tech, countercultural way to help young people begin to see unexplored frontiers in their own lives.

Born in Oregon in 1986, Dugoni briefly played professional soccer in Norway and the U.S. before taking his first real “adult” job in finance in Atlanta. He recalls a “Kafka-esque” experience toiling away in a windowless office — in his free time, he began immersing himself in philosophy and teaching himself jazz piano. 

Philosophers like and got him thinking about technology and society, while jazz — with its improvisations and emphasis on self-expression — pushed him to explore broader themes of personal freedom.

A pivotal moment happened in 2012, when Dugoni, by then based in California’s Bay Area, was enjoying a music festival. He watched in shock as an intoxicated concertgoer danced uninhibitedly while a perfect stranger filmed him with a smartphone, then uploaded the video to social media. Dugoni began searching for a way to make such interactions impossible, wondering how he could create phone-free spaces that foster genuine connection — and a measure of privacy.

“To see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online,” he said in an interview, “I just followed it out logically. Where does that go?”

He’d read enough about the corrosive effects of technology to know that while tech can help create a more open, democratic society, “You don’t get something for nothing.” He knew that giving up privacy in the public sphere could have “a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment.”

In 2014, Dugoni developed the first magnetic pouches out of materials from his local hardware store and began selling them door-to-door — his first customer was a biker bar in Oakland that wanted to dissuade patrons from filming its burlesque shows. Around the same time, he signed his first school.

Then, in 2015, he got a call from comedian Dave Chappelle’s manager, who wanted to at his shows to enforce a no-phones policy. That helped push Yondr into public consciousness, with schools, artists and venues soon queuing up.

The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic began shifting parents’ attitudes around mobile phones and schools. And Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book , which urged schools to go phone-free, pushed the company to even bigger prominence. Yondr now boasts about 150 employees. The company, which is privately held, doesn’t share revenue figures, but a spokeswoman said it has seen “sustained triple-digit growth” over the past three years. Its pouches are used by about 2.5 million students in all 50 states and 45 countries, and the company said the figure could triple once total sales are tallied by the end of the year.

TIME included the pouches as their “” — under the “Social Good” heading, which also included a new malaria vaccine and a 3D-printed resin water filter for people without access to safe drinking water. 

By now, many students understand the importance of going phone-free, even if the locking pouch impinges on their social life. “It’s not the best, but I think it’s for the best,” one student last spring. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo recently chatted with Dugoni, 39, to ask him about the company’s origins, his philosophy and why he considers phone-free schools as spaces where kids can be kids, focus on their studies and develop vital relationships.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to ask you about that 2012 music festival where you came up with the idea for the pouches. What was on your mind? 

I was looking at the smartphone, and the fact that everyone had a recording device, but also access to the Internet. I knew that that was a fundamentally new human experience, and that, from a pure sociology standpoint, there are going to be questions asked because of that that have never been asked before. No one’s had to ask questions about what degree of privacy can you assume in the public sphere. No one had to think about what effect would the ability to be recorded or show up online in any context do to social interaction, to the idea of privacy, to the idea of intimacy. 

This new tool, I felt, was ushering in these questions. But I was walking around San Francisco in my waking life, and no one else was aware of them. In an education setting, it was happening in a different way to the same degree: the push to put more tech into the classroom, faster, which was really nonsensical in a lot of ways. But at a music festival, to see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online, I just followed it out logically. Where does that go? 

I had read enough of people like Foucault and things like that to understand what that ultimately leads to. In a lot of tech society, there’s this idea that transparency in all things is going to create a more open society and more democratization. And like anything, you don’t get something for nothing. You give something up. And that’s how I saw it playing out. If there’s no degree of privacy in the public sphere, I saw it having a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment — things that are deeply valuable for an individual’s psychology, but also the collective consciousness and experience of civil society.

You guys strike me as a privacy company, first and foremost, but also a tech company that’s turning back the clock, in a way. Is that the way you see yourselves?

Not really. I would say we’re a bit of a counterculture company, really. And I would say we’re definitely not a tech company.

I purposely, early on, did not go with early venture capital money because there’s a certain profile that those companies have to follow. What I’m about, especially for young people in a school setting, but also people in daily life, is a sense of choice and a sense of freedom, and especially showing this younger generation that there is a way to walk through the world that’s not completely mediated by screens and the Internet. 

It’s not poo-pooing technology or what it can do. The question is, really, how do you integrate it into our lives? And I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer for it. But I’ve always felt that phone-free schools and spaces, that Yondr started — we created that concept — is a really good way to give people some sense of what that is, because people have to experience it. 

How quickly did you start thinking about schools as users of these pouches?

Our first customer was a venue, and we got a lot of notoriety early on from working with certain artists, like Dave Chappelle. But really, at the same time that we started working with a few venues, we got our first school customer around the Bay Area. So from the very beginning, the two pillars of the company have been centered on those two — that’s been lost in the general story a bit. Now, going around the Bay in 2014, talking about a phone-free school, you can imagine how many doors got shut in my face. But even then, from talking to teachers, I knew it was a huge problem — it just hadn’t floated up into general awareness enough for superintendents to take any notice of it. But teachers knew, even back then.

So where was this brave new school that came to you and said, “We need to do this”?

Well, they didn’t come to me. I went to them. I was going door-to-door. The first school that said Yes was Peninsula High School in San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

And what did they see that nobody else did?

I would say principals and teachers fell into two camps, for the most part, around phones. One group saw it as so far gone that this was a bell that could not be unrung. On the other side, you had teachers and people who knew it was a huge deal, but they were trying to figure out a solution. For a lot of reasons, it’s a difficult thing to unwind. It’s wrapped up with social behavior, social psychology, habits, all of those things. So this principal fell into that camp: someone who had the gusto, the energy and wanted to try to do something. I came to them and said, “Look, I think there’s a way to do this, and I think I can help you do it.” Now, I didn’t know anything about how to actually make it work, so it didn’t work so great in the early days. But we’ve spent the last 11 years figuring out all the things that have to go with it to make this work for a school, a district, and now whole states.

As you said, the ethos at the time was to get more tech in schools, not less. I can see what you were up against.

The drive, at the end of the day, to make things faster, easier, cheaper and more available, it’s very tantalizing. You’re turning kids and people in general into information-retrieval machines, which is very different than critical thinking.

What changed? Obviously COVID had a hand in this. What else? 

Eleven years ago, everything was different, and our team was out on the ground, going into schools. And basically the way we’ve grown as a company to where we are now — we operate in all 50 states, we’re in 45 countries and millions of students use Yondr every day — we did it brick-by-brick, school-by-school. We went in and helped them actually do it, figure out a policy, help them implement it, learn from them how to do it. We’ve had a huge ground game over the years. Up until COVID, we were building that out. We were building around pockets of teachers at first, who helped us figure it out, and then we realized we had to expand into the whole school to make it work. Then it started to grow. And we’re building up just by word of mouth, teachers and principals saying, “Hey, this works, and this company has helped us.” 

Then COVID hit, and that basically flattened out our business. We almost went under. But it also had an incredibly positive effect in the aftermath, because so many teachers — and parents especially — saw what it meant for their kid to be behind a screen for that long. They saw what was happening. So out of COVID, the conversation completely flipped. Whereas before our team was out kind of evangelizing, saying, “Hey, here’s what a phone-free school is, a phone-free space is” — we invented the term — we have people kicking it back to us now and saying, “Yeah, we get it. There’s a problem here, and we’re looking for a solution.” The zeitgeist really changed and people’s awareness clicked over. 

I guess Jonathan Haidt’s book didn’t hurt.

It added a lot of fuel to the fire, but it was, in terms of us, all the schools mentioned [in the book], they’re Yondr schools. So we already knew it. But the general awareness that it generated was tremendous.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a school in Boston that’s using these pouches. My favorite comment from a teacher was, “My students are laughing at my jokes again.” What are some of the reactions that you remember?

Those are the little stories we look for. We have the case studies that show improvements in academic performance, teachers getting more teaching time back, students feeling safer on campus. But the way I see what we do is that it’s a broader cultural shift inside of a school. And so stories like you just mentioned, we hear that all the time: Teachers are seeing the students’ eyes again. We hear a lot that the body language, the posture of students inside the hallways, totally changes. We hear a lot of times that more books have been checked out in the first three weeks at a library than the entire previous school year.

One that’s most interesting to me, in a way, is we’ve heard from a lot of schools that more lunches are being eaten at the cafeteria. It’s not because the kids are less distracted. It’s because a lot of kids are afraid of eating lunch in the cafeteria because they don’t want to be filmed or recorded in an embarrassing moment and posted online. 

What I like about those stories is they help people who are not in the day-to-day, like teachers are, realize what an existential situation these young kids are stepping into. And it reframes that: A phone-free school is not taking something away from students. We’re trying to give them a space to be kids and to focus on their studies, develop the social relationships, a sense of identity that they’re going to need. And phone-free space is part of that.  

Speaking about technology, you recently said it has “this total neutralizing effect on people’s ability to express themselves, because there’s no such thing as intimacy without privacy.” That seems like a big part of this project.

It’s very difficult to find frontiers in modern society anymore: Places you can go where there’s unexpected things, there’s adventure, there’s a sense of unexplored territory. That’s especially hard for this younger generation, which has grown up always being able to look around corners. Things are curated and manicured, and they know where people are at all times. You can look at it through the lens of privacy, which is real, but also through that lens of just what’s unexplored. And when you go to a show that uses Yondr, it’s unexplored. What happens there is for the people who are there. And it makes the experience richer. It leaves a deeper impression on the people there. 

What about the ways students try to get around these pouches? How do you view that? Do you view that as helping you problem-solve or rethink the pouches themselves?

Of course it happens. We’ll talk to principals and be super candid: “You know the students who are going to buck against a new policy, and you know there are going to be students who smuggle a phone through their sock, or whatever.” 

I always want to hear the stories. I smirk a little bit, because it’s good to see that students are using their ingenuity and being creative. But it’s not really about that. The broader message is that it precipitates a cultural shift in the school, where the expectation is that the school is phone-free, bell-to-bell. What we found is that after two or three weeks, that becomes the new normal. Once you establish that inside a school, and a culture that supports it, that’s the point. So if a student finds a workaround, or they want to bring in a phone, the important thing is that the community is ready to deal with that in a way that is appropriate for them. If you reinforce the benefits of a phone-free culture, eventually you win everyone over as they start to see the results.

So we’re not naive about it. We know we’re not going to win over every 16-year-old overnight. But we can convince them and show them that they might enjoy it once they’ve experienced it.

I was listening to a call-in show about phone-free schools the other day, and one of the panelists pointed out that if school is a training ground for students’ real lives, the only jobs where they’re going to have to put away their phones are low-paying service jobs. I’d never thought about it in those terms. Does that give you pause?

There’s something much more fundamental than that happening. I’ve talked to a lot of people in different state agencies. I can tell you they’re having an extremely difficult time hiring young people right now, and a lot of that comes down to their ability to focus, to think critically and to just socialize. Those are skills that you’re less likely to develop if you have a crutch in your pocket that makes those things less risky or easier. A lot of modern technology, it ultimately makes something easier. Now, that’s fine. We do a lot of trade-offs in our life for convenience. But when you get down to what education is about, it’s not just about using a tool. You have to be able to build up critical thinking muscles and some of the aptitude that’s going to carry you through life. 

People say, “Well, we should teach kids how to use these devices.” Absolutely. How do you plan to do that? If you have something in your pocket soliciting your attention all the time, that becomes basically wired into your central nervous system and always offers you a path of least resistance when anything difficult comes along, how do you plan to educate someone, especially a digital native who has no experience of the world without it? So it’s more, “How do you believe human psychology works, and how do you actually develop habits and patterns of thinking?” 

The pouch is more of an impulse disrupter. A student feels the phantom vibration in their pocket. They reach for it. Hand feels the pouch. You’re allowing a new pathway to emerge and develop that leads to a new habit. Because it’s hard to make the argument that young people are not going to have enough exposure to the Internet and their phones to learn how to use them. You can make a lot of arguments to say that six to eight hours a day without it to focus on their studies and being a kid is probably a good thing, given what we know. 

Last question: Talk about your tech habits.

I’ve had a flip phone for 10 years. I’m not saying everyone should do that. That’s my own choice. It makes a lot of things in life very inconvenient, very difficult. But on balance, it helps me because I have fewer inputs than the average person. My morning, I’m not flipping open the news and getting carried away to some place about things I can’t affect in any positive way, which is a big part of the modern world as well. If you allow everything to solicit your attention and your empathy, what are you left with to affect the things positively that you can control? 

That’s a funny effect of digital media in general: There’s a lot of important things, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them, but what can you affect? For me, that’s a choice I have. So I operate in front of the computer, or I do phone calls. It slows my world down. I place a big emphasis company-wide on writing, on clarity of writing, and clarity of thinking that comes out of that. 

And then in my own home life, it’s all about boundaries. Technology as a theme — this is not just the Internet — it’s not totally neutral. Albert Borgmann and Martin Heidegger write about this: It’s not something that knocks at the door and asks permission to enter. You have to create boundaries. And to me, boundaries are best created in a physical way. So I use a computer in one room in my house. That’s it. So my mental associations are, if I’m here, I’m doing work. 

COLUMBIA — South Carolina school districts must ban students from using their cellphones during the entire school day, but exactly how they go about it is up to district officials, according to the state Board of Education passed Tuesday.

At the very least, districts must require students to keep their phones and connected devices, such as smartwatches, turned off and in their backpacks or lockers from the time the first bell rings in the morning until the dismissal bell in the afternoon, according to the state policy.

But the state board said districts can decide whether to enact sterner rules, as well as the consequences for violating them.

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Districts that do not put a policy in place that is at least as strict as the one the state board passed Tuesday could lose their state funding.

“We’re saying, ‘This is what state law says, and so you’ve got to implement it,’ but we are leaving a lot of discretion, a lot of latitude, to districts on how exactly they do it,” board member Christian Hanley said.

The decision follows a clause the Legislature included in the state spending plan requiring the state board to create a policy prohibiting cellphones for K-12 students in the state’s public schools. The specifics, legislators left up to the board, which in turn left many of the details to local school boards.

Although state board members supported the idea of banning cellphones in schools, they said they worried about unintended consequences of the new policy, such as putting another task on overworked teachers, increasing the number of out-of-school suspensions or cutting students off from their parents during emergencies.

“Implementation of such a policy over a school day scares me,” said board chair David O’Shields. “Why? Because once we create this policy, it is the requirement of every district to follow suit, and there is the law of unintended consequences, and it frightens me.”

School boards will to put in place a policy at least as strict as the one the state board enacted, according to a memo the department sent to superintendents in June. District must submit those policies to the department to ensure compliance.

The state board, which passed the policy 15-1, added a stipulation that districts must report back about how implementation went in case the board finds a need to adjust its policy ahead of next school year.

“All of these things look good, but just because it looks good doesn’t mean it is good.” O’Shields said.

The policy

In the state policy, the board did decide lunch and other breaks should be considered part of the school day, meaning students must leave their cell phones stowed away during those times.

Districts may choose to take it further telling students not to bring their devices to school at all. Or they can buy lockable pouches to store them. Some may also decide to include bus rides, field trips or athletic events as times when students can not access their phones, according to the policy.

The policy also leaves room for exceptions.

If students have an assignment they cannot complete on school-provided devices, districts can allow students to keep their phones with them to use as part of their classwork.

Students with disabilities who need access to phones or tablets to learn would still be allowed to use the devices. And students with certain outside jobs, such as volunteer firefighters, can seek a written exception from their superintendent to use their phone during the day, according to the policy.

Enforcement also will largely be up to school districts. The policy requires “disciplinary enforcement procedures,” with increasing consequences for repeat offenders, but it doesn’t specify what that means.

State board members did discourage using out-of-school suspension as punishment for violating the policy. Taking a student out of school because they are breaking a rule meant to keep them focused on their classwork feels counterintuitive, said state Superintendent Ellen Weaver.

“The whole idea behind this policy is that we want students in classrooms getting instruction,” Weaver told reporters. “Taking students out of that instructional space really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as far as I’m concerned.”

Still, different situations may warrant different punishments, so board members wanted to leave that decision up to the districts, said board member David Mathis.

Timing

Some board members felt they did not have enough time to create the policy.

Board member Beverly Frierson was the sole “no” vote, not because she disagreed with it but because she thought the board was too rushed to give the policy the consideration it needed, she said.

O’Shields, the board chair, worried teachers may have to spend too much time policing cellphones. Still, he agreed some kind of action was necessary.

“I know we need control, and there is an addiction, no doubt,” O’Shields said.

The policy has support from legislators, teachers’ advocates and Gov. Henry McMaster. Since 2020, McMaster has included this clause in his state budget recommendations. This was the first time legislators agreed to put it in the final plan.

“The research is clear,” McMaster wrote in a letter to the board Tuesday. “Removing access to personal electronic devices during the school day improves student academic performance and removes distractions that exacerbate anxiety among our adolescents.”

“Our responsibility is to create an environment where teachers can teach, and students can learn,” the letter continued.

In a statewide survey the education department conducted, 55% of teachers and administrators who responded said they supported a total ban on cellphones during the school day. Another 37% said they wanted students to have limited access during class time, with the chance to check their phones between classes or at lunch.

Along with being distracting while students are trying to learn, phones can erode their social skills and encourage bullying, Weaver said.

“I think the dividend that we will see this pay for schools and for our students’ future will be worth it in the end,” Weaver said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

Public school districts across Arkansas are expected to be able to lock up students’ cell phones during school hours, with the state Department of Education distributing $7 million to pay for pouches or lockers.

The Arkansas Legislative Council will take up the restricted reserve fund request Friday after the Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review subcommittee approved it Monday on a voice vote with some dissent.

“This initiative seeks to foster a phone-free environment, enabling an evaluation of its impact on student learning, engagement, and overall student health,” Department of Education Chief Fiscal Officer Greg Rogers wrote to Department of Finance and Administration Secretary Jim Hudson requesting the funds.

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The phone restriction initiative is part of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Education Secretary Jacob Oliva announced in July. The program will also provide grant funding for telehealth mental health services and support for locating mental health providers and navigating insurance matters, .

Cell phone policies at Arkansas schools vary among districts and individual classrooms. While some teachers collect phones at the start of instructional time, others allow students to access their devices after completing assignments.

The $7 million allocation is an estimate of the cost of the locking devices based on the number of students in the roughly 180 school districts that have applied to participate in the pilot program, said Courtney Salas-Ford, the education department’s chief of staff.

School districts rather than the state would be responsible for replacing the devices, but metal lockers and magnetically-sealed cloth pouches “have a very long life expectancy,” Salas-Ford said.

The pouches from , a California-based company with the goal of creating “phone-free spaces,” can be locked and unlocked by separate unlocking devices kept under the supervision of adults while students keep the pouches with them at all times. , the De Queen School District approved the use of the pouches for middle school and junior high students as part of its participation in the pilot program.

Sanders has repeatedly advocated for reducing social media use among teenagers, citing concerns about depression and suicide rates.

“Our country has been experimenting with unregulated smartphone use for more than a decade, and unfortunately the results have been absolutely devastating for our young people,” Sanders said at at Bentonville’s Ardis Ann Middle School.

Bentonville West High School piloted a program last year that required cell phones to be silenced and stored during class. Bentonville School District Director of Communications Leslee Wright said in July that the initiative was a “remarkable success,” with 86% of staff reporting a positive impact. Administrators also recorded a 57% reduction in verbal or physical aggression offenses and a 51% reduction in drug-related offenses, she said.

YONDR CEO Graham Dugoni attended the press conference, which marked the start of the pilot program a month after it was announced.

“One of the things he said that really stuck with me [is] this isn’t about taking anything away,” Sanders said. “This is about giving students the freedom to enjoy a phone-free education.”

As part of the pilot program, the University of Arkansas’ Office for Education Policy will examine how students’ mental health may be impacted by reduced access to cell phones and social media. A smaller group of districts from the pilot program will participate in the UA study.

In May, Sanders sent a copy of Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, to all state and territorial governors in America, as well as Arkansas legislators. According to the July press release, she expressed support for four main goals: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and more outdoor play and childhood independence.

Proposals to reduce smartphone use have been gaining traction across the country, including in , , .

that Sanders championed would have been the first in the nation to require minors to receive parental permission before signing up for a social media account. A federal judge last August, hours before it was set to take effect.

Arkansas lawmakers might introduce legislation in January requiring all districts to lock up students’ phones during the school day, House Speaker Pro Tempore Jon Eubanks, R-Paris, said during Monday’s PEER meeting.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

Getting students hooked on classic games is one way Principal Sham Bevel has tried to soothe their separation anxiety after the banned cellphones two years ago. At Bayside, students must keep the devices in their lockers during school hours.

But convincing kids there’s something better than posting TikTok videos or browsing friends’ Instagram posts is an ongoing struggle.

“Cellphones are to children what the blanket was to Linus,” Bevel quipped.

Cellphone bans during school hours have gained momentum in recent months, with states like Virginia, and  taking action and the Los Angeles and New York districts moving in that direction.

But schools may find that deciding to remove phones is the easy part. The real test is finding a way to secure and store them that both staff and families find acceptable. Complete bans leave some parents nervous, but partial restrictions often put teachers in the uncomfortable position of policing the rules during valuable class time. 

“All of these have pluses and minuses,” said Todd Reid, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. The agency is gathering public comments on how best to implement Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s July 9 to have phone restrictions in place by Jan 1. Officials will release guidance in mid-September. “All of them really come down to how the policies are implemented.”

One approach to banning phones, storing them in students’ lockers, can be hard to enforce, said Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the

“Teachers say that students ask to go to the bathroom and then go get their phones,” she said. “It still allows negative activities to happen between classes — cyberbullying, planning fights and others videoing them.” 

Sheila Kelly, a board member for , a Virginia advocacy group, raised another practical issue: Not all schools have lockers. What’s most important to her is that schools restrict phone use not just in class, but during breaks.

“It’s during those in-between times … that students can experience the mental health advantages of phone-free interactions, allowing them to grow socially and emotionally,” she said.

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A growing number of schools say Yondr pouches, which cost about $25 per student, accomplish that goal. 

The neoprene sleeves, often used at live music and comedy events, lock with a magnetic closure and can be reopened with a device usually mounted near a school exit. Districts among the company’s top customers include and , according to GovSpend, a data company. 

In June, Delaware Gov. John Carney signed a budget that includes $250,000 for a Yondr in middle and high schools this fall. Last year, the company earned $3 million in government contracts — doubling its business from 2022, GovSpend shows.

In New York City, where Chancellor David Banks is currently hammering out the details of a ban expected next year, some teachers prefer Yondr because it takes them out of the enforcement business: Students lock up their phones in a pouch when they come to school in the morning and can’t remove them until they leave in the afternoon.

Vinny Corletta, a Bronx English teacher, used to work in a school where teachers employed incentives to discourage phone use. Kids could rack up points for prizes — from pencils to  sneakers. But frequent reminders still took time away from instruction.

“I’m a teacher; I don’t want to hold 30 cellphones for students all day,.” he said. 

Now he teaches at Middle School 137, where students put their phones in a Yondr pouch when they arrive and then store them in their backpacks. He thinks that even if they can’t access their phones, students prefer having them close by rather than in a locker or classroom storage container.

But no method is foolproof. Students have been known to disable Yondr locks or even surrender a dead older phone while stowing their current model in a backpack. 

“Kids are so smart — sometimes more than adults — and always find loopholes,” said Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that provides support services to students in low-income schools. 

He’s worried about students being “policied, patrolled and punished” for violations, recalling the Los Angeles district’s failed iPad rollout in 2013. Students easily broke through the and used the iPads to play online games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run. The district stopped allowing students to take them home.

“I thought the district should’ve hired those kids … to teach district staff about technology security,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if schools exhaust their energy trying to implement this ban.”

Los Angeles officials have until October to specify how they’ll enforce a ban the board approved in June. 

But some L.A. students think adults have blown the issue out of proportion. Alejandro Casillas, who will enter 11th grade at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles this fall, said teachers already confiscate phones if they see them more than once during class or offer extra credit to limit use. He gave up his phone once to get the additional points. 

“I think this image of phones being a distraction is over-exaggerated,” he said. “If the district were to take away cellphones, I think some students would still be distracted.”

Students might think they’re good at multitasking, but experts say that allowing them access to phones in class prevents them from on their lessons. Research also points to following phone bans.

Israel Beltran, a rising sophomore at Mendez High School, said he doesn’t use his phone in class except when teachers allow it during breaks. At that point, he often turns to funny videos on YouTube. But the idea of a total ban makes him feel like he’s back in elementary school. 

“When we had a toy or something we shouldn’t bring to school, they usually would take it away from us and give it back at the end of the day,” he said. 

‘A lifeline’

Parents have been among the most divided over districts’ efforts to ban students’ phones. The Phone-Free Schools Movement has a team of across the country, mostly parents who track district policies and promote cellphone bans for students in their communities. 

But a recent national survey from the showed that while parents support “reasonable limits” on use, a majority — 56% — think students should occasionally have access during school hours.

That’s especially true for parents whose or health issues.

In Los Angeles, Ariel Harman-Holmes doesn’t want an across-the-board ban. She was afraid her son, who will enter sixth grade at the Science Academy STEM Magnet this fall, would lose a phone. So she gave him an Apple Watch, with its own number and data plan. With ADHD and a condition called face blindness, he sometimes can’t recognize people or even familiar places — a limitation that was especially stressful when people wore masks during the pandemic. 

“He couldn’t even tell who was an adult and who was a child. He didn’t know who to trust,” she said. One day he used his watch to call his parents, who helped him get reoriented. Now she plans to have use of the watch written into his special education plan as an accommodation. “I feel like kids with certain disorders or disabilities, like autism, anxiety, possibly depression, need a lifeline to their parents.”

Regardless of which method districts adopt, parents have found that enforcement can be inconsistent. 

Victoria Gordon, whose son Malik attends Republic High School, a Nashville charter, supports leaders’ efforts to minimize use during class. The school’s official policy prohibits students from accessing social media during school hours. But visiting one day last year, she saw her son using his phone in class.  Sometimes, she glimpses photos he posts during school hours.

“Why is my child on Instagram at 10 o’clock in the morning?” she asked. “They’re not implementing what they’re saying.”

The 74 wants to hear from educators, parents and students on how cellphone bans in your states, districts and schools are going. .

The 2021-22 academic year was the hardest for George Read Middle School Principal Nicholas Wolfe, an educator for 17 years. It was the school’s first full year back since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Wolfe recognized that his students were struggling and started researching the effects of cellphones and social media on adolescents’ mental health. 

“It was one of those things where it’s like, I can’t unknow now what I know, and I need to take action,” he said. “From there, it’s like, ‘All right, what are the ways that I can get to a phone-free environment here at George Read Middle School?’ ”

Wolfe has utilized an “expectation and enforcement of the expectation” structure to create a phone-free environment at his school since , but does not have a phone ban. The expectation in George Read Middle School is that phones will not be used because they’re out of sight, with YONDR phone pouches being the tool to enforce that expectation.

One line item in this year’s  aims to eliminate distractions from phones and social media in classrooms throughout Delaware. 

Lawmakers approved $250,000 to test an expansion of such cell-hiding pouches, like those made by tech company YONDR, in other state middle and high schools, along with other measures.

The Delaware Department of Education will be responsible for gathering experts, creating the system for the pilot program and later evaluating it. The department will also create the regulations for the applications districts will use when applying for funding.

State Sen. Eric Buckson (R-Dover), a former educator, voiced strong support for the pilot program and said the inspiration for its creation came from teacher feedback during Teacher Appreciation Days. 

“I asked [teachers], ‘Hey, if you were king or queen for a day and could write the rules, what’s one of the first things that you would do to get better control of the hallways and the classrooms?’” Buckson said. “Either No. 1 or No. 2 on that list is to take the phones.”

The Delaware State Education Association, the union that represents state public school teachers, feels encouraged that the General Assembly is listening to educators and trying to find solutions and resources to address issues like behavioral issues in schools, said Taylor Hawk, the director of legislation and political organizing at DSEA. 

“That is absolutely encouraging, and we definitely see the cellphone pilot as another example of legislators being responsive to issues that they’re hearing from educators in their districts and we look forward to seeing the results,” Hawk said.

Multiple school districts  like the Los Angeles Unified School District or the entirety of Florida, have implemented their own phone pouch policies in schools.

Critics of phone bans in schools — whether through using pouches or by having a strict “no phones” policy — have raised concerns over how students would be able to contact their families during emergencies, especially in an era of school shootings.

Wolfe has found a middle ground between having students contact their families when needed, and enforcing his phone-free environment. 

While every classroom at George Read Middle is equipped with a phone, students can also go to the office and ask an administrator if they can use their phone to call home, Wolfe said. Students must make sure their phone is out of sight before returning to class. 

Parents, lawmakers and educators in Delaware are also concerned with the state’s test scores in recent years. Only 24% of eighth grade students were  in math during the 2022-23 school year, and 41% were proficient in English/language arts.

Experts and advocates hope to see better behavior and test scores after the pilot’s implementation. Studies have found a  between media multitasking and attention problems and evidence for potential detrimental long-term effects among early adolescents. 

Kenneth Shores, assistant professor at the University of Delaware who specializes in education policy, has also seen adult learners be distracted by their phones during college classes.

“It’s just like a thing that your mind goes to if you’re slightly bored or challenged by material,” Shores said. “Removing those kinds of easy distractors, I think, is great, because it keeps students engaged on the material.” 

Not everyone is convinced that phone bans are an easy solution to rectifying behavior and improving test scores. 

Removing phones from classrooms will not single-handedly fix the issues within Delaware’s education system, said Britney Mumford, the executive director of DelawareCAN, an advocacy group that works on public education improvement and equity.

“It’s going to lead to more engagement, and paired with other things, will hopefully improve test scores,” Mumford said. “We don’t need to treat it as, ‘Oh, we’ve cracked the code, we’ve figured out what the problem is and this is going to solve it.”

While Hawk has heard phone policies posed as a possible solution in conversations about behavioral issues in the classroom, it has come up in addition to other solutions like more resources for mental health professionals, she said.

Buckson expects that the DOE will run out of funds before schools’ needs for phone pouches are satisfied, and has already had “a couple” of schools reach out to him directly. 

 is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Spotlight Delaware maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens for questions: jowens@spotlightdelaware.org. Follow Spotlight Delaware on  and .

Spurred by his concerns about social media’s impact on children, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Wednesday announced he’s encouraging schools to adopt cellphone-free policies in their classrooms.

Cox has sent letters to district and charter school leaders, school principals, community council members and the State Board of Education “sharing his concerns about the harmful effects social media has on our children and asking them to remove cellphones during class time,” Cox’s office said in a news release.

“We all know that cellphones are a distraction and when we put phones away we can actually focus and study,” Cox said. “Cellphone-free learning environments will help our teachers teach and our students learn.”

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The governor said “we want to give our schools every opportunity to succeed” and he hopes Utah’s public and charter schools “will join me in this effort to keep phones in backpacks or lockers during class time.”

A spokeswoman for Cox told Utah News Dispatch the governor isn’t going as far as to encourage teachers to feel free to take away cellphones during class time, but rather he’s encouraging schools and their districts to adopt cellphone-free policies. He’s recommended “educators engage with parents and collaborate as they work together to develop cellphone policies,” according to his office.

Utah is currently suing social media companies including and , alleging their platforms are addictive and mentally harmful to children.

Last year, Utah also became the first state in the nation to pass two pieces of legislation prohibiting minors from using social media between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. unless authorized by a parent. The new laws, which take effect March 1, also require age verification to open and maintain a social media account in the state.

NetChoice, a group representing TikTok and other major tech companies, filed a federal suit against Utah in December, alleging the state’s regulations are unconstitutional because they restrict access to public content, compromise data security and undermine parental rights, the reported.

What’s happening in schools already restricting cellphones?

Cox’s office noted many schools in Utah have already moved forward with schoolwide cellphone policies to restrict student access, pointing to Delta High School and Millard School District’s “cellphone-free” policy, requiring students to put their phones in a clear pocket that hangs in front of the classroom.

“It was a battle to begin with, but it has been so worth it,” said Jared Christensen, vice principal of Delta High School, in a prepared statement. “Students and parents have all adapted, our teachers are happier and learning has increased.”

Cox’s office also said schools have “shared experiences that are supported by compelling national data,” citing an article written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business titled “”

Haidt wrote “research is clear: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships and belonging.”

Evergreen Junior High in Granite School District also does not allow cellphones to be out anytime during the day — in classrooms, halls or lunchrooms. Cox’s office said one of the reasons Evergreen Junior High “has been so successful” with adopting and implementing their cellphone policy is “that they proactively educate parents on the benefits.”

“It’s so much easier to just ban them altogether,” said Evergreen Principal Ryan Shaw. “Learning has improved, and our scores reflect that. Bullying and fighting have decreased. The students connect with each other in a more meaningful way. We are grateful for the support we have from our community council — it’s been critical.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com. Follow Utah News Dispatch on and .

Since 2021, the company has seen more than a tenfold increase in sales from government contracts, primarily with school districts — from $174,000 to $2.13 million, according to , a data service. The , and Akron, Ohio, districts are among those requiring all middle and high school students to slip their phones into the rubbery envelopes each morning and unlock them with a magnet at the end of the day.

“All signs point to 2024 being even busier,” said Sarah Leader, the company’s spokeswoman. With an using the pouches this year, the company has doubled in size to 80 employees to meet the demand. 

“It’s a game changer,” said Patricia Shipe, president of the Akron Education Association. She worked with district leaders to pilot and then adopt the Yondr system this year. Students are less distracted and schools feel calmer, she said. “The transitions between classes are faster because kids are not on their phones.”

Most districts already students from using phones in class for non-academic reasons. But phone-free advocates say tighter restrictions are necessary to refocus students on learning following the pandemic and to minimize the negative impact of social media on .

Such moves typically draw strong reactions. Some parents see phones as integral to staying in touch with their children during emergencies.

But many welcome the opportunity to curb frequent disruption. Teens report being on social media “almost constantly,” according to from the Pew Research Center. Efforts to break their habit, at least during school hours, could get a critical boost if Congress passes that would create a $5 million grant program to cover the costs of “secure containers” like Yondr or wall-mounted .  

“Widespread use of cellphones in schools are at best a distraction for young Americans; at worst, they expose schoolchildren to content that is harmful and addictive,” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican, said in about his bipartisan proposal with Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat. “Our legislation will make schools remain centers of learning.”

Congress would still need to approve funding for the program. The legislation also directs the Education and Health and Human Services departments to study the impact of cellphone bans on student achievement, mental health and behavior. 

A ‘security nightmare’

Getting student violence and bullying under control is one reason the Akron school board approved its with Yondr in June for 10,446 pouches. Leaders hope locking up phones during the day will halt a troubling pattern of students not only using them to on social media, but record the altercations on video. 

“It was happening daily in our buildings and multiple times a day,” Shipe said. As in many districts, physical attacks against teachers had also increased. “It was just a real security nightmare.”

Many students have rebelled against the changes. And Shipe warned that opposition to losing what she described as “an appendage” for most teens “gets worse before it gets better.” Online discussion threads among students include ways to destroy the pouches, and demonstrations on TikTok show how bending the magnetic closure prevents them from locking.

But as Shipe notes, those who sabotage the pouches typically keep their phones hidden during class, if only to avoid getting suspended. 

“There are just a lot of positives,” she said. 

Many researchers and advocates agree that school phone bans have more benefits than drawbacks. In October, nearly 70 child advocates, educators and mental health experts sent Education Secretary Miguel Cardona asking him to urge schools to adopt phone-free policies. Late last month, an author of the letter met with a senior department official, but didn’t get the response she wanted. 

“The secretary does not intend to act on our phone-free schools letter,” said Lisa Cline, part of the , a coalition focused on limiting children’s use of digital devices. 

Cardona has yet to reveal his opinion on banning phones, but he’s frequently mentioned the role social media plays in the mental health problems facing students. In March, Cardona said media companies should be for “the experiment they are running on our children.” Two months later, the that the department would work with other agencies to issue model policies for districts on phone use.

An Education Department spokesman said officials are still preparing that guidance and are working “in close partnership” with on the issue.

Under the Senate bill, districts would need to get feedback from parents on cellphone restrictions before applying for funding, and the bill directs Cardona to choose grantees that will “likely yield helpful information” on the impact of phone bans. The program also would allow exceptions for students with disabilities and those who need phones for translation apps or to treat health conditions.

While Yondr’s growth is one piece of evidence on the trend, pointed to the popularity of phone bans among parents. In a sample of nearly 11,000 parents with a child in school, 61% agreed with getting phones out of the classroom. The National Parents Union is currently collecting more data on the issue, but the stance of its president, Keri Rodrigues, is firm.

“The data is clear,” she said. “[Phones] should absolutely be banned during the school day. Every parent I talk to has agreed.”

International points to higher test scores when phones are out of sight, and say students tune in to class more when they’re not scrolling on social media. In Massachusetts, where Rodrigues lives, the state education department already for districts that clamp down on use, and Commissioner Jeffrey Riley has hinted at .

But aren’t on board.

“Parents are afraid because of school shootings,” said Melissa Erickson, executive director of Alliance for Public Schools, a Florida nonprofit that aims to inform parents about education policy. “That’s a statement of the times.”

She called those in favor of strict bans “tone deaf” to the way students socialize. Kids depended on devices to stay connected to friends and teachers during the pandemic. Banning them, she said, sends a mixed message.

“We told them that one-to-one is everything and now we’re taking it away,” she said. 

‘The extreme end’

Florida has gone further than any state to curb use during school hours. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in May that prohibits students from accessing social media, especially TikTok, and from using phones except when teachers approve their use for educational purposes.

Districts, however, have some discretion. After instituting limits on use during class this year, Pasco County Schools Superintendent is calling for a by the 2024-25 school year. The Hillsborough district board that allows students to keep their phones if they are “powered down, silenced, and stored out of sight unless authorized by staff.”

Last year, teachers tended to set their own rules, said Kendal Coulbertson, who graduated in May from Armwood High in Hillsborough. Some teachers, she said, didn’t mind if students used their phones as long as they were turning in their assignments and getting good grades.

But she thinks a ban goes too far.

“I was engaged in conversation. I was engaged in learning, and I think, honestly, that should be the goal rather than going to the extreme end,” she said. She added that are a “real issue” and students want to be able to reach their parents in case of an emergency. “There could be some type of middle ground.”

Like parents, educators are split on the issue. In some districts, including Akron and Florida’s , bans on phones extend through lunch, a time when teens typically check in with social media. 

“It has to be all or nothing,” said Shipe, the Akron union leader. Teachers, she added, shouldn’t have to haggle with students to lock their phones back up after lunch. 

Enforcement was a daily struggle for Dina Hoeynck, a former teacher in Cleveland who taught graphic design. At her school, students had access to their phones between class periods and teachers were in charge of ensuring they were locked up — a system she described as “impractical.”

“Going through the rigamarole of having students lock their phones at the start of class and unlock them at the end felt like a massive waste of time,” said Hoeynck, who kept needle nose pliers on hand to straighten pins on pouches when students bent them. “It led to a significant loss of instructional time and created unnecessary power struggles between teachers and students.” 

Mark Benigni, superintendent of Connecticut’s Meriden Public Schools, is among those who oppose a blanket policy,

“We must educate our students on the appropriate and effective use of cellphones as we do for all technology,” he said. “We also need to recognize that today’s cellphones offer numerous opportunities to enhance learning, organization and communication. Many students are emailing teachers using their cellphone and district-provided emails.”

Benigni happens to be Cardona’s former boss. Before President Joe Biden tapped him to be secretary, Cardona served as assistant superintendent in Meriden until becoming Connecticut’s education chief. While the district didn’t pass its until April 2021, Benigni said it closely follows practices in place when Cardona worked there: Students can’t use phones during instructional time unless a teacher permits it or if they’re necessary to access the district’s online learning platform. 

“The secretary always supported the safe use of technology when he was here,” Benigni said. “There are times when teachers need to have students put them away.”