— Students’ phone use is disruptive, but teachers and administrators seeking a fix face an unlikely opponent
Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal:
— A rural school district in Colorado tried to ban smartphones. Parents stood in the way.
Phones were at the center of more than half the schools’ disciplinary issues by 2022—not just kids watching TikTok and YouTube in class, but cyberbullying, spying in bathrooms and recording fights.
Teachers and administrators say gadget bans are the only way to regain student focus and tamp down on misbehavior. Parents complain that they need to be able to reach their kids at all times, both for emergencies and routine scheduling issues. Parents are turning out to be unexpected but forceful opponents of schools’ attempts to keep kids off their smartphones.
In Brush, Colo., teachers and administrators settled on a compromise for the 2022-23 school year. Students could keep their phones, provided they were out of sight. To reach their parents, they needed a teacher’s permission and had to use the phone in the office. If a student was busted, the phone was confiscated and a parent needed to pick it up.
The policy, which is still in effect, was too much for some parents, says Brush School District superintendent Bill Wilson. Several parents transferred their students.
Administrators say they are trying to do what’s best for students. Experts often blame smartphones for fueling the youth mental-health crisis, through social media and its most angst-amplifying features. Teachers say they spend too much time policing phone use. And even school systems that are so far reluctant to ban phones know the fights are just beginning.
‘A disconnect with parents’
About a quarter of notifications hitting teens’ phones daily come during school hours, according to a recent Common Sense Media report. Teens use smartphones for a median of 43 minutes during the school day, said the report, the primary time-suck being social-media and messaging apps.
Parents are often the ones texting their kids, teachers say.
“There seems to be a disconnect with parents,” says Liz Shulman, an English teacher at Evanston Township High School in Illinois, where phones are expected to be put away during class. “They often sound very supportive of cellphone policies and they want their kids to learn, but they also want access to them at all times.”
Dozens of parents told me they support school cellphone bans.
But in a recent poll from the nonprofit National Parents Union, most parents who supported banning phones in class said they should be allowed at other times, such as passing periods, lunch and recess.
“Parents want a direct line to their kids during the school day,” says Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of policy and action for the National Parents Union.
She, too, likes being able to reach her 8-year-old son by phone during the school day. “We should be teaching students how to use cellphones responsibly, not banning them,” says Taylor Smith, a former high-school teacher.
School shootings have raised parents’ anxiety. As a mother of three, I’m certainly as worried as any other parent about school violence. School-safety experts say that using phones during an emergency can endanger kids. Ringing or buzzing phones can give away the location of a kid who is trying to hide from an intruder, and parents on the line can distract students from following lifesaving instructions from school personnel.
Day to day, parents are mostly texting kids things that can wait til the dismissal bell, teachers tell me—practice reminders, pickup changes and other such minutiae.
Students comprehend more and have less anxiety when phones aren’t present, some studies show. A Massachusetts boarding school I wrote aboutfound that students became more engaged in class after it banned smartphones.
Even the partial ban at the Brush school district in Colorado last year was effective: Visits to the principal’s office fell sharply among high-schoolers compared with the year before, Wilson says.
Normalizing no phones
Mark Daniel, superintendent of Fort Wayne Community Schools in Indiana, told parents earlier this year that the district would test a cellphone ban, to run through the end of the school year.
The district began locking up students’ phones at two middle schools and two high schools in mid-March. The exercise would help determine whether discipline and classroom engagement improved in the absence of phones.
— Techmeme
