Putting away your cellphone for six hours a day turns out to be a wonderful thing — even in the eyes of middle schoolers who were forced to give up their devices for an entire school year.
Locking up their cellphones, the Hampstead Hill Academy students said, unlocked their brains. With their phones stored in pouches only an administrator can open, they no longer feel that constant itch to sneak a peek. They aren’t sneaking off to the bathroom to look at texts from friends. They are no longer tethered to them during lunch or recess to check what social media drama is unfolding.
Now they play soccer and volleyball and socialize. They can focus intently on math class. And their grades have improved.
“It’s revolutionary,” said Agustin Aguayo, a seventh grader at the East Baltimore elementary/middle school. “If you don’t get good grades, then you can’t do anything in life.”
Across the Baltimore region, more schools are banning smartphone use in classrooms. Bolstered by a groundswell of research showing the devices’ harm to kids, local education officials are cracking down on policies that until recently have been largely left up to teachers to enforce. On the table is the idea of establishing phone-free schools, but that idea must be sold to fearful parents who have grown dependent on being able to contact their children at any time of day or night.
“I just made a decision that this is unacceptable and we have to get back to the work of focusing on teaching and learning,” said Anne Arundel County Superintendent Mark Bedell, whose district this week announced a zero-tolerance policy on cellphone use in class.
Baltimore City schools CEO Sonja Santelises also said she’s determined to attack the problem this year by encouraging the use of pouches or mini-lockers for cellphones and underwriting the cost at the schools that volunteer to try the approach.
“This is a time when our young people need the adults to be the adults in the room and say enough is enough,” she said.
These moves accompany a bipartisan shift in attitude across the country.
Five states already have passed legislation to limit cellphone use, according to the ExcelinEd, a national educational nonprofit. Florida prohibits cellphone use during instructional hours and requires students in grades six to 12 to receive instruction on social media’s effects. And New York’s governor has announced she will introduce legislation to ban cellphones in schools next year.
No Maryland school system is telling students they can’t bring their phones to school. They say that parents have stated clearly that they want to be sure their children arrive at school in the morning and home again at night. The debate is over what to do with phones that are on students when they enter the school building.
The research, school officials say, is clear and convincing.
In a Pew Research survey, 72% of teachers said students being distracted by their cellphones is a major problem in their classrooms. And the U.S. Surgeon General sounded a note of caution earlier this year, saying that social media is adversely affecting children. A third of young people say they are using social media “almost constantly.”
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” has been one of the most vocal advocates for reducing cellphone use. He charts the beginning of a decline in mental health to 2012 when smartphones began to proliferate. He notes that teenage loneliness and feelings of isolation went up and academic achievement went down, citing reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Baltimore City Public Schools last year joined districts across the nation suing the social media companies that operate Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube over the impact of their content on teens’ mental health.
“The severity of violence increases with the addition of cellphone social media use,” Santelises said.
A small number of city and Baltimore County schools will be locking up phones in pouches this year. The pouches, made by Yondr, are soft cases that cellphones slide into and then are latched by school staff using a magnetic device at the top of the pouch. The locked-up phones stay with students all day, until an administrator unlocks the pouches as students are heading out of the school doors in the afternoon.
The locking and unlocking process was a little cumbersome in the beginning of the year, said Bria Shah, an eighth grader at Hampstead Hill, as she demonstrated how the devices work.
“Just a couple seconds” is all it takes, she said. “And unlocking is even easier.”
It’s not a foolproof solution. Students have been known to cut through their pouches to free their phones, or insert a broken cellphone into the pouch while keeping their working phone on them.
Anne Arundel schools are trying a different tactic. This fall, Bedell said elementary and middle school students must have their phones off and out of sight through the school day, including during lunch and in the hallways. High school students must follow the same guidelines, although they can use their phones during lunch.
“I want to let our kids show us that they can be responsible adults, but we are also working with the community,” Bedell said. If students cannot keep their phones packed away during the day, he said he will not hesitate to make changes, including using pouches.
Local school leaders said they believe they must engage parents and the community in finding a comprehensive approach to limiting cellphone use.
Students’ cellphone use is the top concern of teachers in Howard County, according to Superintendent Bill Barnes. The school system is reviewing its policies and an advisory group will give recommendations on what steps the district can take to curb the use of phones by January 2.
Principals and assistant principals believe part of the resistance from parents is a lack of understanding of the depth of the problem. At Hampstead Hill, the assistant principal said he developed a presentation to explain to parents the damage caused by cellphones.
“If you came home and your 11-year-old was smoking pot in the bathroom” you would do something about, said Hampstead Hill assistant principal Mike Lucas. What parents don’t realize, he said, is that allowing their child to spend six hours a night on TikTok may be far more harmful.
Cockeysville Middle School in Baltimore County began taking disciplinary action against students with cellphones last year. Adam Carney, the principal, said they kept records of students who were violating the policy. What they found was that students who had violated the policy five times had grade point averages that were a full point lower than other students.
“The data shows that it is a distraction,” Carney said. “Nobody realizes how dangerous a cellphone is as a gateway to other things. I think it is bringing elements into their kids lives that they don’t know about yet.” For instance, he said, parents may not understand that giving a teenager access to TikTok allows people to send private messages to their child.
Most parents’ greatest fear is that they want to talk to their child if there is an active shooter in the school, said Matt Hornbeck, principal at Hampstead Hill.
“We actually don’t want 920 kids to pull out their phones if there is an emergency in the building,” Hornbeck said. Those calls would prevent students from hearing important instructions in an emergency and might cause noise at a time when they want quiet.
The school installed phones in every classroom, and they have told parents they can call the office and talk to their child for as long as they want.
“We are asking the question ... how do we set up the right conditions so the enforcement is not on the shoulders of teachers?” Santelises said.
The changes have, in some ways, been slow in coming.
When the pandemic hit, cellphones became one of the few ways for students to stay in touch with their friends. Santelises believes that students need to learn to interact with one another in person, so they can witness the impact of their words on their friends.
Cece Couteau, a seventh grader, said now for six hours a day at school girls aren’t talking to each constantly by text or on social media. “There’s still drama,” Cece said. “It is more face-to-face drama.”
Baltimore Banner reporter Jess Nocera contributed to this report.
About the Education Hub
This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.
