By Terra Morrison, age 12
In recent years, advances have been made in smartphones that drastically change how we see and use our technology on a daily basis. Even in the last 15 years, owning a smartphone has become much more normalized. Now, as younger and younger kids are getting their first phones, it invites the question: How are schools going to deal with this sudden upsurge of technology use in the school day?
In the past, limiting device usage at school wasn’t as much of an issue, considering kids didn’t really have phones, or if they did, they weren’t smartphones. However, now that so many do, it has become much more of a problem. According to Gallup, a 2023 survey of middle school students showed that 51% were on social media for a minimum of four hours per day. A study by Common Sense Media found kids are spending 43 minutes on their phone during school on average. Zach Rausch, associate research scientist at the NYU Stern School of Business, told Bloomberg News, “Kids are feeling isolated, lonely, disconnected. They’re also performing poorly in schools.” In addition to being a distraction, social media and phone use are linked to low self-esteem and cyberbullying.
As schools all over the U.S. are facing these problems, they are finding different ways of restricting phone use during the school day. Among the most common of these methods are pouches in which kids are required to put their phone at the start of the day. These pouches vary from signal-blocking velcro pouches, that will keep students from sending or receiving anything on their phone during classes, to the Yondr pouch, where the phone is placed in the morning, locked, and can only be unlocked with a special magnet at the end of the day.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2021-2022 school year, 76% of public schools in the United States said they had some kind of ban on phone use. According to Ballotpedia, “As of November 12, 2024, ten states had enacted laws or policies on K-12 classroom or school cellphone usage.” Depending on what kind of phone ban and what kind of phone pouch, it can be expensive for a school to implement a policy. According to the Times Union, one New York school spent nearly $27,000 on Yondr pouches for their phone restriction policy.
Many schools all over the country are taking action to restrict or ban phone use in school. This is leading to increased participation in classes and, according to KFF, can lead to better outcomes on tests and assessments overall.
However, not everyone is happy with school phone restrictions. While some students have gone from fighting these bans to realizing that they are really helpful in increasing focus, the same cannot be said for everyone. Students at many schools have figured out how to cheat the system, and some are even organizing protests against phone bans. Lots of people even argue that this is not a priority, and they would rather have their tax dollars be spent in different ways.
Not only are kids pushing back, parents have their own arguments. Many of them are worried that they will be unable to contact their children in an emergency. There are also concerns about kids with disabilities that rely on certain technology to aid with their learning at school. Jenn Silverstein, mother of two students who lived through a shooting at their Denver high school, told Chalkbeat, “It made me realize that the idea of schools going phone-free just doesn’t work for me.”
Among all of the controversy and disagreement about phone bans, it remains true that much of the work around upholding the policy has to be done by teachers. Amy Zimmer, bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York, says, “Teachers feel the burden of responsibility of enforcement.” Another article from Chalkbeat reports that teachers feel like having to constantly police phone use in their classes is making it hard to form good relationships with their students.
As technology becomes more normalized and a bigger part of peoples’ lives, schools have to adapt to what is becoming the new normal. Although people disagree on the subject, what most can agree on is that the amount of time kids are spending on their devices, even at school, has negative consequences. There have been—and doubtlessly will be more—attempts to fix these problems and come to an agreeable solution. At this point there really is no right or wrong answer to this question, and at the rate technological advancements are being made, it may be a long time until one is reached.
