Students Praise School Cell Phone Ban

Says one student, ‘I’ve been hanging out with my family, actually.’

OUR NOTE: if anything this proves that our children are led and need discipline, wisdom, compassion, love, and the ways and means to learn to think critically.

An Iowa school sought to curtail the impacts of rising cell phone use on bullying, learning, and student mental health
via The Midwesterner Staff

So what happened after a week-old cell school phone ban in Iowa that’s convincing officials there to spread the good news?

• Improved focus

• higher quality family time

• more social interaction, and

• less anxiety

Gateway High School Principal Aaron Ruff, offering advice for schools considering limits on student cell phone use, said…

Do it. Do it.

It’s not as bad as you think.

I think parents are well aware of what cell phones are doing to their kids.

They’re seeing it at home.

I think parents are behind this.

Ruff and others in the Ottumwa Community School District recently explained to KCRG how the learning experience has improved since students were required to lock their phones away this year, following several other area districts and schools that have implemented similar policies.

The shift came from a group that included students who studied the impacts of rising cell phone use on bullying, learning, and student mental health, concluding that less phone use could improve all three.

Ottumwa High School Principal Shelley Bramchreiber told the Ottumwa Post…

In about mid-June, we began to think and realize that our district was going to be cell phone free K-9 because it had already been determined that our elementaries were, Liberty was and Evans Junior High had piloted it in the spring and it went super well.

So the question came to us what if we did a district wide ban?

We began a gathering committee with students, community members, staff members, administrators, central office staff and board members.

We tried to gather stakeholders from every realm to be part of this committee to see what it would look like in our schools.

The new policy requires students to lock their phones in a cabinet during school hours, and the results after just one week speak for themselves.

Improved focus, higher quality family time, more social interaction, and less anxiety are all products of a week-old cell school phone ban in Iowa that’s convincing officials there to spread the good news.

Ottumwa High School sophomore Dawna Rupe told KCRG of her phone…

That was kind of like my anchor, but (the phone ban) has helped me find new ways to cope (through reading and writing).

Gateway senior Madison Shoop said…

I think my attention has kind of skyrocketed if that’s the word.

I was more focused on, like, my phone, and, oh, my gosh, is that going to go off?

The change, she admitted, has also improved her family life…

I just think I was so addicted to it that it was hard for me to look away personally, for me to look away like I would just be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling scrolling.

At points in time when my mom talked to me, like, I couldn’t hear because I had my headphones in, I was scrolling through my phone, and I wasn’t paying attention.

It was a similar situation for Gateway freshman Paizlee Thomason…

I’ve been hanging out with my family, actually.

I’m usually just locked up in my room.

Data from the Pew Research Center last year found that 46% of teens said they’re online “almost constantly,” up significantly from the 24% who said the same in 2015.

Pew Research this year found 72% of U.S. high school teachers consider cell phones a major problem in the classroom, while Edweek.org has correlated those issues with poor academic performance.

Fights started on social media, classroom distractions, and issues with mental health, have convinced lawmakers in more than a half-dozen states to impose statewide bans.

And while liberal lawmakers in California and New York are currently considering the same, Michigan lawmakers have remained hostile to the move despite the documented benefits.

In Ohio’s Akron Public Schools, those benefits have created a “significantly better, friendlier, and safer” school day for students since the district made the change last year, WOIO reports.

Jessica Sax, principal at Hyle Community Learning Center, told the news site…

I think students felt a lot more comfortable with the process because they know that I still get to keep my phone but I know when I’m in classes that phone is not distracting me and keeping me from my learning.

The result was fewer fights and better grades.

Sax continued…

We have a seen a significant decrease in the number of what we would say were pre-planned fighting where students were texting, messaging each other, talking about going and meeting somewhere in the building or classroom and fights occurring.

This is something that is positively impacting our district, positively impacting our students, and I would say this is something we should continue with.

Experts studying the issue seem to agree, pointing the Financial Times to a wave of positive results in both conservative and liberal communities that suggest the political tides have turned against cell phones in schools.

Zach Rausch, chief researcher on Jonathan Haidt’s new bestseller, The Anxious Generation, told the financial site…

There is a deep hunger across the U.S. and around the world: parents, teachers and teens themselves want . . . to roll back the phone-based childhood.

Rausch described the situation as a

… collective action problem: if everyone else is on their phones and you’re not [teens are] in jeopardy of social isolation . . . but when you take away these devices at group level the incentive to use them tends to go down.