Community Weighs Value of Phones in Schools

July 29, 2024
• Locals are advocating for stricter policies around phone use in Needham Public Schools following teacher frustrations and students’ negative relationship with their devices.

Adam Cole first joined the Needham High School math department about 17 years ago, the year the iPhone was first introduced. Nearly two decades later, with smartphones increasingly integrated in our daily lives, Cole has spent much of his day thinking about the devices — for the wrong reasons.

In recent years, Cole said more students seem “effectively addicted” to their phones, which pose a major distraction in the classroom. They text each other to meet in the hallway during class time, watch short-form videos that “have tremendously reduced their attention span” and often spend the beginning of class in silence, engrossed on their phones.

“I can have a full class of 20-plus kids with nobody talking before the bell,” Cole said, “and that was not the case a few years back.”

Cole and other NHS teachers shared similar accounts of students’ uncomfortable reliance on their phones and how their usage impacts classroom learning. With a month until school starts back up, a parent-lead advocacy group is now pushing for an outright smartphone ban in an effort to combat those impacts.

Phone addiction among kids is something Needham parent Nick Teich has thought much about in his role as an overnight camp director-turned-consultant. In that environment, kids spend the summer without technology and develop social skills, he said. When he sees a group of kids together but all on their phones, it strikes him as “really heartbreaking.”

After reading “The Anxious Generation,” the recent best-seller that connects students’ mental health with smartphone use, Teich organized a Zoom meeting with other parents, which grew into a Facebook group called Needham Family Collective now boasting about 160 members. Their top priority, Teich said, is “a complete ban of [smart]phones in schools.”

“There’s really no reason why kids should be having a phone in school all day,” Teich said. “We’re really trying to push [a ban] because we want kids to be able to be with one another and learn in school, but also develop these friendships and relationships that are so important for their growth and their mental health.”

Teich said schools could use Yondr pouches, which are sealable phone sleeves that can only be unlocked using a specific device.

Ali Blauer, another Needham parent in the group, recalls her own upbringing without advanced technology, cell phones and the addictive qualities that come with it. Restricting phones and their constant distractions would benefit all parties — students and teachers — she said.

“It’s the opportunity cost of what isn’t happening when they’re using their phone instead of socializing with their friends, talking to someone in the hallway for five minutes, while kids are on their phones now instead,” Blauer said.

Under the adopted student handbook, which the School Committee approved in late May, personal electronic devices are “prohibited in the classroom except with the express permission of the classroom teacher.” That written policy has gone unchanged since at least the 2019-2020 school year.

As a statistics teacher, Cole has asked his classes for the past couple years for their average screen time to find an approximate average. The results are astonishingly high, Cole said, sometimes reaching seven or eight hours daily.

Cole starts every class the same way: Telling students to put their phones in their bags and take their earbuds out. That, however, loses power over time, he said, and he was still reminding students of the rule at the end of the school year.

Occasionally, Cole will ask students to use their phones to play Kahoot — the online quiz game some teachers use to review material — but otherwise phones should be away during class. Other classrooms implement phone holders, which Cole used to use every day, until it just became “another thing for me to keep track of.”

One veteran NHS teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, instructs sophomore students to use a phone cubby or phone hotel, similar to a hanging shoe pouch with pockets. The teacher said they stand by the door at the start of class and watch as students place their phones away, but kids still found ways around the policy by using a second phone or taking their phone out when they use the bathroom.

For juniors, who just zip their phones away in their backpacks, they’ll need to use the cubby in this teacher’s class this fall.

“It stops the class flow, [causes] disruption, other kids are looking at it,” the teacher said. “They can text anyway on the computer, but the problem is on the phone, they’re going down these other paths.”

This teacher, however, feels as though they are in the “complete minority.” Their coworkers overwhelmingly feel it is the students’ responsibility to get off their phones, they said.

Still, they feel students’ phone use is an addiction.

“Some kids are looking at the phone cubby longingly,” the teacher said. “It’s unreal.”

Being a math teacher, Brett McNeice couldn’t help breaking down the issue by the numbers to the School Committee at its June 18th meeting. When students spend most of their half-hour X-block — a thrice weekly period students can work on projects or receive help from faculty — on their phones instead, it adds up to several days of school, McNeice said.

McNeice requires his students place their phones in phone hotels, but he describes the practice as an “ongoing battle” with freshmen, even a couple months into the school year.

“I would like to be able to use the phone hotel during that time as well,” McNeice said of X-block to the School Committee. “I just don’t realistically think my attention can be helping students with math and monitoring my homeroom at the same time.”

During the day, he observes students on their phones during lunch, and they often run to grab their phones from the cubby during short classroom breaks. At the back of his classroom, he’ll often see “heads down on cell phones,” he said.

A school-wide phone hotel policy may sound promising, but McNeice told the committee he doubts it would address the issues present in his classroom.

The same conversation is taking place in Newton, where parents are also advocating for more stringent school policies around cell phones. Other districts in the commonwealth have already implemented restrictions on phone use, including those in Lowell, Quincy and Holbrook. In Pittsfield, phones will soon be banned during school starting this August, and New Bedford High School may soon follow suit.

While NHS Principal Aaron Sicotte hasn’t ruled out shifting Needham’s school practices, he opposes an outright cell phone ban.

Current NHS policy indicates phones should not be used during instructional time or in instructional spaces without teacher permission, Sicotte said, but many teachers integrate phones as an “instructional tool” by allowing students to take photos of material, take digital notes, listen to music while drafting a paper and more.

Sicotte does, however, recognize the distractions, and more classrooms are using phone holders since the pandemic, he said. But if students have access to their phone in all other times and places besides school, it creates a disconnect.

In other words, banning phones does students a disservice, in Sicotte’s view.

“We have an obligation to teach kids. They’re going to have phones on them pretty much their entire lives, and so to simply say you can’t ever have access isn’t preparing them for what they’re going to experience down the road,” Sicotte said. “It also starts to undermine the credibility that we have if they are engaged in technology in all manners of their life except when they come into a place designed to teach them and prepare them for the future, when they can’t use the very technology that they’re always using.”

An NHS teacher, who asked their comments be anonymous in order to speak candidly, said they feel school administration “made it clear that they didn’t want to really be dealing with phones” years ago, meaning the responsibility fell on classroom teachers. The culture around teacher detention also dissolved several years ago, the teacher said, meaning existing policies are hard to enforce.

Enforcement does take time and attention away from teaching, Sicotte acknowledged, but because of the school’s strong relationships with students, “rarely does it end in any sort of battle.”

Another Needham teacher, however, shared a situation that did result in a battle that ultimately ended with little consequence. The teacher, who spoke anonymously with Needham Local, said one student exhibited an “outright phone addiction and also just defiance” when asked to put their phone away.

After writing the student up for misconduct, they met with an administrator to problem solve, but when the student behavior continued, more meetings resulted, ultimately ending in the student receiving about an hour of detention.

The punishment came after repeated reminders in class and emails home to parents and administration, as well as several meetings.

“This one negative behavior, you can see how much work it requires on behalf of the teacher,” they said.

“I think sometimes we try to treat high schoolers like college kids,” the teacher continued, “and I think that that oftentimes, unfortunately, backfires.”

Patty Patria, the chief information officer at Babson College, said classrooms are now filled with smart technology that is tied with much of collegiate learning. Smartphones can be used for interactive activities, taking attendance, notetaking and students with accommodations, Patria said.

But phones are “definitely a distraction,” Patria said, and can lead to academic dishonesty and multi-tasking. Generative artificial intelligence — such as ChatGPT — is drastically changing how students complete assignments and, in turn, how teachers teach, she said.

Should students have access to other technology, such as a computer, for taking notes or to fulfill accommodations, Patria said there wouldn’t be a need for phones in the classroom.

“I think most colleges, universities and high schools are going to have to really understand that students are going to use technology inside and outside the classroom,” Patria said, “and the way that we teach in the way students learn probably has to evolve.”

To mitigate distractions, teachers can share information and research to help students understand their reliance on their phones, which helps spark a dialogue and “allow for students’ voices and ownership in the decisions,” Sicotte said.

“Kids simply come into school having 100% access to their phone 100% of the time, and then they come in and they have zero access… that becomes very jarring for kids and creates, honestly, some animosity and some friction that isn’t really conducive to the relationships or the learning that we want to have here in the building,” Sicotte said.

Needham Public Schools plans to discuss phone policies in the coming months “to see if there is action that needs to be taken,” Superintendent Dan Gutekanst wrote via email. NHS is interested in reviewing its policies with student and parent input in mind, Sicotte said.

In an informal faculty poll at the end of the year, the vast majority of teachers signaled they’d like to see more formal policies around phones, according to two teachers present at the meeting.

The Needham Education Association, the local arm of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, had no comment on the issue.

One of the anonymous teachers opposes a ban and favors simply putting phones away. A phone ban would be too difficult to implement, they said, and would be a challenge for the administration to manage.

For the students themselves, senior class president Alex Duan said a ban would not be beneficial. While he understands the other side of the issue — and students do get distracted by their phones — he feels it’s impractical to “police 1,200 kids,” it presents a safety concern in emergency situations and students should learn to live with their devices.

The “phone jails” could be sufficient enough, Duan said — he’s used them in his own classes, including in pre-calculus last year.

“If these parents do want to ban phones, I think the solution is pretty simple: Just take your kid’s phone,” Duan said, “because it would be unfair to other people who don’t really struggle with their phones but do enjoy having their phones still to text their friends in between class times or watch videos during their study block.”

Students occasionally use their phones to text or play a game, but Duan said many listen to music and take photos of the board. It’s also easier to play Kahoot on a phone as opposed to a computer, he said.

Duan does, however, recognize the harms cell phones pose on the classroom culture. He repeated the observations some teachers have made regarding the lack of socialization before lectures, adding he could lean more toward a school-wide ban for that alone.

Some of his classmates seem addicted to their devices, he said, and are “always on Instagram reels,” which he, too, can be guilty of. Still, he feels it comes down to the individual student.

“If you’re on your phone, you’re only hurting yourself,” Duan said. “You’re not paying attention to class, you don’t get good grades — that’s kind of your fault.”

Sicotte said change won’t materialize unless parents and schools are on the same page — he’s interested in understanding phone and technology access in students’ homes.

“So if parents are expecting schools to solve this, then we’re gonna fail,” Sicotte said. “If schools are expecting parents to solve this, then we’re gonna fail. There really needs to be some unison and some unity around how as a community we think kids should be engaging with phones.”

Some parents are signing up for the Wait Until 8th pledge, a movement that encourages families to wait to give their children smartphones until the eighth grade.

Blauer, the Needham mom, is a parent to a rising second grader and preschooler, but despite their young ages, she plans to start the conversation about phones and social media now.

Blauer used the analogy of wearing a seatbelt: Cars once were made without seatbelts, but safety requirements evolved and laws were created to require people to wear them. Because smartphones are still so young, people don’t yet know the extent of their impact, Blauer said, but it’s important to start talking about the safety around their use.

“I think that we’re missing an important part of what it is to be an adolescent and growing up and learning how to engage with your peers,” she said.

The advocacy group plans to circulate a petition for a full smartphone ban this fall and is in the process of connecting with community members and Needham officials, Teich said. For those skeptical of the ban, Teich said the pros outweigh the cons.

“We just have to be able to use phones responsibly,” Teich said. “They’re great tools, but kids are just not developed enough to be able to make those choices while they’re trying to learn.”