School Context
I’m beginning my fifth year as principal of Interlake High School in the Bellevue School District of Washington State. To say Interlake High School is complex is an understatement. For contextual purposes, we’re an International Baccalaureate school, home to the district’s Advanced Learning program (consisting of nearly 600 students), 58 languages other than English are spoken at home. We’re also incredibly diverse in our socioeconomics, and we consistently get ranked in the top 1% of high schools, according to the US News & World Report. To be fair, any noteworthy accolades existed before I arrived at Interlake. And like any public high school, we have students whose needs we’re not meeting, and often, that data disproportionately represents our students on the margins.
My first year in the principalship was the virtual 20-21 school year. I didn’t meet some of my staff in person until the end-of-year BBQ in June. Suffice it to say, my journey as principal has been mired by entire systems, schoolwide practices, and traditions getting dismantled almost overnight, needing to be reinstituted or reimagined.
In the 22-23 school year, my Building Leadership Team (comprised of 8 certificated teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators) decided cell phones were limiting students’ ability to access their education to the degree that we needed a schoolwide intervention. We spent the majority of that year galvanizing support from our staff, understanding that our success would be a “united we stand, divided we fall” scenario. By June of 2023, a survey to all certificated teachers showed that 98% of staff wanted a more stringent cell phone policy and that 88% of teachers were willing to support a common cell phone management strategy. In the 23-24 school year, we were poised to start our first year of being a phone-free school.
Our System
Pocket charts became our schoolwide practice for managing devices. Students were expected to put their phones in their pockets from bell to bell. For students who didn’t comply and used their phones during class, teachers were encouraged to enter “observations” into our Student Information System, and when students reached certain thresholds, they would receive interventions anywhere between detention to a 30-day cell phone ban where the phone would stay in the office from 8-3 pm or at home (with parent/guardian agreement).
Staff qualitative data and survey feedback indicated that when it came to managing cell phones during instructional time, it was the best year our school had experienced in a long time. However, the system wasn’t perfect. Admittedly, it was never meant to be. Let’s explore why.
The Problem
We quickly realized that our schoolwide expectations could only be enforced to the extent that our school district policies supported it. Our original plan was not to make the pocket charts optional and to require students to utilize them every period, every day. Data and research indicate that the “dopamine hit” and urge for students to check their phones when it’s on their person is too strong, clearly and negatively impacting their learning. When student’s challenged our schoolwide expectations about the pocket charts, our district policy didn’t support our student handbook language. Instead, it supported that a student leaving their phone on their person wasn’t disrupting the learning environment.
After making changes to our intervention systems and making the pocket chart the only management system for all teachers, the 2024-25 school year has been remarkably more successful. We’ve built the culture and gone through last year's growing pains. However, if I’ve learned anything through this process, culture, and school district policy are two circles in a Venn Diagram, and you want to find yourself in that overlap.
Let me be the first to say that in my 8 years in the district, our school board hasn’t been positioned to codify this shift into our policies. Between COVID-19, the short tenure of superintendents, interim superintendents, competing priorities in our district, and other factors, it is difficult to imagine a window where multiple stakeholders could have come together on such a large topic.
As we enter the 2024-25 school year, our school board is set for a full review and revision of Policy 3245 (Telecommunication Devices), a policy that has yet to be revised since its adoption in 2012. Over the next several months, district and building staff will engage with students, parents, and community members to determine community opinion on cell phones in schools. I hope we will have a policy and procedure outcome that empowers the school’s ability to minimize cell phone distractions to maximize and increase student engagement and learning.
But should we be making this decision locally? To what degree should the Legislature codify this in state law? Has support from stakeholders and the general public reached a critical mass that it makes sense?
National Data
Let’s look at some metadata, or as my social studies teacher likes to say, zoom out from the trees and look at the forest. I’ll break things down into different constituent groups:
Teachers
- A spring 2024 survey conducted by the National Education Association found that 83% of teachers support an all-day phone-free policy.
- A Pew Research Study found that 72% of high school teachers thought cell phones were a major distraction in their classrooms.
- A 2024 survey from Study.com found that 76% of teachers in schools with strict mobile bans reported increased student engagement.
- Students
- In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt details that adolescents have seen a 134% increase in anxiety since 2010 and a 106% increase in depression in that same time period.
- In a study conducted by Common Sense Media, 50% of their participants ages 18 and younger received at least 237 notifications per day on their cell phones. Almost a quarter of them happened during school hours.
- Rates of school loneliness have doubled since 2012, according to a survey conducted by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Parents
- A 2024 EdChoice survey found that 70% of parents believe phones shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom.
State Level Interventions
At least 13 states have passed laws, recommended local policies, or incentivized local districts to create phone-free schools. Representing nearly a quarter of our states, one may think our nation has reached a tipping point in preserving the integrity of our classrooms.
At closer inspection, however, it’s clear that we’re still in the infancy of this movement. Six of the thirteen states (AR, DE, PA, AL, CT, and my own state of WA) have only incentivized or recommended districts create policies. Delaware and Arkansas, for example, have made funding available for districts willing to create programs and policies restricting cellphone use during school hours. The three states that have recommended policies are just that, a recommendation without funding, legislation, or any sense of urgency.
Seven states (IN, MN, OH, VA, FL, LA, SC) have either required district policies or passed statewide bans. While some districts have gone as far as using state funding and aid as a carrot by which schools can receive once they have implemented a cell phone policy (South Carolina), all of the seven have taken more compassionate and sensible measures to ensure students with health conditions, translation needs, and specific accommodations within IEP’s and 504’s will still have access. Almost all 13 states have also given teachers the discretion to determine when cell phones should be put away and/or used for instructional purposes.
Conclusion
At first, I wanted to use the term precipice to describe our current national situation describing cell phones in schools – a dangerous situation that could lead to harm or failure. However, upon further reflection, our national data suggests we’ve been living in that dangerous time. Countries like Belgium and Norway have recognized this and taken action in the fight for our attention.
Few schoolwide topics receive bipartisan support at the state level. This is one of them. Few schoolwide topics receive such galvanizing support from all stakeholders within a district. This is one of them.
The decision isn’t something we’re doing to students. It’s something we’re doing with students. The research is there. The support is there. It’s time for all states to pass laws and create phone-free schools.
Resources
Phone-Free School Administrator Toolkit