Learning curve: WA schools grapple with new cell phone policies

Lunch is the only time during the school day the girls get to use their devices. The Peninsula School District, encompassing Gig Harbor and Key Peninsula, instituted a new policy last year that banned cell phones during class and passing periods. Goodman is one of Peninsula’s four middle schools.

Peninsula is part of a movement across the country toward school cell phone bans that seems to be accelerating this year. School districts are attempting to address parents’ and educators’ long-standing concerns about the harmful effects of devices on children. In the light of recent school shootings, however, the idea has attracted pushback from parents who would prefer students maintain constant contact with the outside world.

In Washington, the Mercer Island School District announced a “phone-free schools” policy in July. It joined a number of other Washington districts imposing similarly strict limits; individual schools also imposed restrictions.

In August, the state superintendent told school districts to make a plan to curtail classroom cell phone use by fall 2025. A proposed state law aiming to curb cell phone use in schools didn’t make it past committee earlier this year.

For many parents, teachers and even some students, the new policies are a welcome change. Others are more skeptical.

Zimmerman thinks rules against cell phone use in school are “a good idea, but within reason.”

Students should be able to have their phone on them during the day, she says, but should have to put it away in their locker if caught using it.

Her friend Bartlett agrees. It’s good for students to have their phones on them for safety reasons, she says, “in case something bad happens.”

They shouldn’t be on their phones in class, though, she notes.

‘A culture shift’

Lori Dennis began to have serious misgivings about what her son was looking at online after he started sixth grade at Seattle’s Hamilton International Middle School.

At his Seattle elementary school, few kids had had cell phones, she said. If they had one, they weren’t bringing it out in school.

But sixth grade was a turning point. Though her son didn’t have a phone, she heard he was seeing content on other kids’ devices she thought was inappropriate for an 11-year-old. A sniper video game, for example, was one cause for alarm.

That lines up with Molly Branson-Thayer’s experience. From what she’s seen as a parent of two kids at Hamilton, kids’ interest in phones shoots up in middle school.

“Now kids are going through puberty and are becoming aware of a whole bunch of different things,” Branson-Thayer said, “and at that time having their phone is a portal to a lot of those new interests.”

Branson-Thayer is co-president of Hamilton’s Parent Teacher Student Association. Dennis is the “technology liaison,” a role she says the Association created for her after she expressed her worries to the group. Last year, the PTSA brought to their school’s administration research they’d done on strategies to reduce phone use.

Beyond inappropriate content, Dennis and Branson-Thayer heard about other incidents: kids filming each other in the bathroom, using social media to organize a fight and making “who’s hot and who’s not” pages.

This year, Hamilton’s administrators are acting on the Association’s concerns.

Beginning the second week of September, students have had to lock phones and other personal devices in bulky gray pouches they carry with them during the school day. Students can open the pouches, made by a company called Yondr, at “unlocking stations” around the school.

Kids with a medical reason to use their phone — for example, a diabetic student checking their blood sugar — receive Velcro pouches instead of locked ones.

Cell phones were a major disruption in classrooms before the change, said Hamilton principal Eric Marshall. They also took up a significant amount of time for administrators, who would have to collect phones from students who wouldn’t put them away.

Even though the school had a rule against phone use, the temptation to break it was too great without a physical barrier like the Yondr pouches, Marshall said.

“Yeah, we got some kids that don’t like it,” he said of the pouches, “but it’s a culture shift.”

‘If something happened’

Twelve-year-old Abigail Dillard has decorated her Yondr pouch with hand-drawn hearts and flowers. It’s going to be her pouch for the next couple years, after all.

Dillard is a seventh-grader at Hamilton. Last year, phones were a big distraction at school, she said, remembering how kids would go to the bathroom to use them in secret.

The pouches are a distraction too, though, she said after the first day of using them. She knows of at least two kids who have figured out how to break the lock on their pouches by slamming them on desks and chairs.

On that first day, a student stole another’s phone, she said, noting that the pouches, being larger than phones, are easier to steal.

To Dillard, having to use the pouches feels like being punished for other kids’ misbehavior.

She acknowledged she’d texted her friends in class a couple times last year. But she has also used her phone to ask her parents to pick her up when she was feeling sick and the school nurse wouldn’t send her home.

“It doesn’t happen necessarily a lot,” Dillard said. “But the few times it does I really need my parents.”

Parents, too, often want to be able to reach their kids at school. Nicole Butcher, a parent of three in Marysville, likes that her high schooler can text her during the day. If he’s going somewhere after school, for instance, he can tell her that way.

She does not agree with restricting students’ phone use during lunch or passing periods as long as it’s not a distraction, because the device belongs to them.

During class time, she said, she has no problem with teachers holding onto students’ phones as long as the devices aren’t locked away.

Butcher doesn’t like the idea of the phones being completely inaccessible, though. She wants her kids to be able to call their parents or first responders in an emergency situation.

“I think that’s a big concern for most parents in our country at this point,” she said.

‘It seemed to fill a void’

The way one expert sees it, however, phones don’t keep kids safe at school in emergencies. In fact, he believes the inverse is true.

In an active-shooter situation, the last thing security directors want kids to do is use their phone, said Peter Stiepleman, a retired superintendent from Missouri who is now an advisor for Yondr and lives on Bainbridge Island.

Phones spread misinformation. They can distract kids from adults giving instructions. And they overwhelm cell towers during emergencies, he said, inhibiting first responders’ ability to communicate.

If a kid had to access their phone locked in a Yondr pouch, he said, they could cut it open.

Phones can also create unsafe situations. Teenagers will film and share videos of other teenagers performing sex acts, for example, Stiepleman said, which schools then have to figure out how to deal with.

Stiepleman is an advocate for “phone-free schools,” which he stresses is different from a cell phone ban. A ban would prohibit students from bringing their phone to school at all, which would be unrealistic for kids who have adult responsibilities or who are coming home to an empty house.

“There are a lot of reasons why you want kids to be able to access phones,” he said, “and at the same time, we want to be able to say ‘There’s a time and place for that.’”

After the iPhone emerged in 2007, Stiepleman said, schools around the country had to come to terms with the new technology.

Within a few years, he said, districts started passing policies that not only allowed, but sometimes even encouraged, kids to bring their device to school for educational reasons.

Teachers were interested in using cell phones in instruction, Stiepleman said, and districts didn’t have the funds to distribute devices to every student, so “it seemed to fill a void.”

As different social media platforms started popping up, phones became more disruptive, he said.

Hearing from teachers about the distractions phones caused “absolutely was a mind-set shift for me and my peers,” he said.

Then the pandemic happened.

“All of a sudden, your phone was your only window to the world,” Stiepleman said.

The resulting isolation and reliance on devices for social interaction “didn’t end when the pandemic ended,” he said. “They brought it back to school.”

‘They just didn’t know what to do with each other’

After pandemic lockdown ended, Peninsula School District leaders watched students have difficulty socializing in person.

“The rules seemed to be blended throughout COVID,” said district superintendent Krestin Bahr.

When kids came back to school in 2021, they were not allowed to talk to each other because of strict social distancing and masking requirements.

As restrictions loosened, those habits didn’t go away, said Goodman principal Ty Robuck. In the lunchroom, whole tables of students would be texting each other while “sitting right here across from each other,” he said. “They just didn’t know what to do with each other.”

Not only students struggled to adjust.

Coming back, “I felt like a brand-new teacher,” said Scott McInnis, a Goodman math teacher. “I spent a year and a half teaching online and figuring out how I wanted to do that, and then all of a sudden that was gone.”

Peninsula didn’t have an official district-wide cell phone policy before last year, which led to different expectations in different classrooms.

Some teachers still enforced stricter rules. Melissa Guttormsen, who teaches science at Goodman, got a few emails from parents frustrated they were unable to reach their child while in her class.

Texts or calls from parents used to disrupt the school day.

“A lot of times, I know the parent’s intent is: ‘I’m just going to shoot a message and when they can, they will read it,’” Guttormsen said. But many kids think “I need to look at this now. It’s my mom, I gotta respond. ”

The new cell phone policy has made parents a lot more understanding, she said, because they know the rules and are no longer upset at inconsistent standards.

Robuck said he is seeing less and less of the antisocial behavior he witnessed from students in the first few years out of lockdown.

The policy has “really changed the way kids have engaged,” Robuck said. “Even though they can have their phones during lunch, a lot of them don’t.”

‘It makes them want to do it more’

Lilly Smith, 13, said she’s had a phone since she was around 8.

Smith, an eighth grader at Goodman, uses it to play games, message friends and access TikTok and Snapchat.

“I feel like TikTok kind of takes over,” she said. “You have to have a limit on it, because you could just sit there scrolling effortlessly and not realize how long you spend on there.”

It can be stressful, especially when she sees “drama” on the social media app — either between people she knows at school, or people far away.

During Covid, sitting in front of a screen for hours was hard, Smith said. “I didn’t really understand what I was learning.”

The new cell phone policy is good overall, she said, because phones are a distraction.

But she also feels the policy is “making kids more sneaky.” Students still bring their phone to class, she said, though they’re not supposed to.

“I think it’s definitely making kids want to go on it more,” Smith said.

When kids “know they’re not supposed to do something,” she said, “sometimes it makes them want to do it more.”