Schools Took Away
Students’ Phones. Now They’re Treating Separation Anxiety
Compromises include letting
young people see their devices from afar or hold them in a locked pouch
The
'phoney pack' made by a high school teacher to hold students’ cellphones during
class.
By Sarah Krouse Jan. 20, 2020 1:40 pm ET
Before class each day, a
high-school teacher in Indianapolis grabs a clear plastic bag and fastens it to
her waist with a ribbon. The homemade pouch is a repository for phones that are
either confiscated or handed over voluntarily by students who don’t want to be
tempted to tap or swipe during class.
She
calls it the “phoney pack,” and the magic of the makeshift vault isn’t that it
keeps devices out of reach. It’s that it lowers students’ anxiety by keeping
their phones in view.
Smartphones
have long been a scourge for teachers and administrators, who have employed a
range of strict measures to keep them out of the classroom. But it turns out
that getting rid of phones introduced another distraction: withdrawal pangs.
Now,
teachers across the country are testing their own methods for managing their
students’ phone-related angst. Some use lockable pouches that let students hold
their phones rather than having to leave them alone in their lockers. Others
have set up charging stations in classrooms, betting that the visibility and
value of a charge will keep students at ease. Then there are the teachers who
have decided dangling extra credit and other prizes is the best defense against
phone withdrawal.
Students
don’t always appreciate the efforts to appease them.
South
Bronx Early College Academy Charter School in New York decided two years ago
that making students leave their phones in their lockers wasn’t working:
Scofflaws sneaked out of class to use them. So the school bought a bunch of
locking, foamlike pouches from a company called Yondr that also markets its
devices to theaters that want to prevent audience members from filming
performances. The students can keep their phones with them but can’t access
them without a special magnetic unlocking mechanism.
The
school lets students decorate their pouches, to “make them as cool as humanly
possible for something that’s restricting them from their device,” says
principal Brian Blough.
During
the first few weeks, students were “fiending” while waiting in line at the end
of the day for the teacher to unlock their pouches, Mr. Blough says.
Eighth-grader
Olamide Oladitan and some of his fellow students tried to pry and cut open
their pouches with objects like pens and scissors. “It didn’t work,” Mr.
Oladitan says.
In
some of the more extreme hacks proliferating on YouTube videos, people have
gone as far as setting the pouches on fire.
Mr.
Oladitan says he eventually gave in. “I didn’t like it because I really wanted
to get to my phone,” he says, “but at the same time I didn’t hate it because it
helped me get better grades.”
Some schools have opted for the carrot over the
stick. At High Point Academy Fort Worth in Texas, students in Jayne Lawrence’s
English and creative writing classes download an app called Pocket Points that
tracks when they touch their phones. Students can redeem points for different
tiers of awards that kick in at 10, 15 and 24 class hours off the phone,
earning prizes ranging from a drink at Starbucks to the ability to drop their
worst test score.
Ms.
Lawrence says the system is worth it because it gives her a way to combat
students’ addiction without confrontation.
“The
quickest way here to burn a relationship is to take something from them,” she
says.
When
Joseph Riffle’s school in Fairborn, Ohio, allowed teachers to set their own
rules on devices, he realized his policy of letting kids keep phones on their
desks as long as they didn’t use them was just too tempting. He also knew he
couldn’t take the phones too far, considering they’re the most expensive thing
some of the students own.
So the 32-year-old teacher purchased boxes with USB
plugs on Amazon.com and set up a table near the
front of his class where his sophomore American Studies students could charge
their devices—and gaze at them from a distance. The expectation was “you turn
in and you plug in,” he says.
The
charging system worked for about three years until the school required phones
to be put away all day.
Some
schools say confiscating devices at the start of each day is the only way to
block all phone-related distractions and others threaten to put students’
phones in a locked “cell block,” hoping the fear of loss will lead to
compliance.
Parents at Roosevelt High School in Seattle sent
administrators dozens of thank-you notes and emails in 2018 when they announced
the school would require cellphones to be put away in a bag or locker for the
day. The school had previously allowed individual teachers to set their own
rules.
“Some
teachers were feeling like the bad guy and others were feeling like it was a
free-for-all,” says Delaney Ruston, a parent who once made a film about
families and screen time called “Screenagers.”
When
DREAM Charter High School in New York opened three years ago, teachers
collected its roughly 100 students’ phones in homeroom each day, a task that
became unwieldy as the school’s population grew to 300.
DREAM
now uses a “Harry Potter-like” system that allows students to earn points that
give them privileges such as being able to hold on to their phone rather than
having to lock them in a Yondr pouch, principal Jared Francis says. Students
earn credit for good grades and actions such as persisting through challenges
that help them achieve “prefect status,” a reference to the Hogwarts students
who earn special privileges.
Mr.
Francis says the school’s policy is aimed at teaching responsibility. “In the
real world no one is confiscating my phone, but I use it a lot and I have to
learn how to manage that,” he says.
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