Austin-area school districts ban cellphones to prevent bullying, improve student achievement

From KUT News:

Shannon Brady held up a poster that read “Smart Kids, Not Smart Devices” and asked her class of sixth-graders what it was all about.

To help students focus, one boy said.

“Exactly!” the English teacher responded. “If I’m thinking about my phone the whole time, I’m not focused on what I’m supposed to be learning, right? And, so this is actually a gift to you this year.”

It was the first day of class at Hudson Bend Middle School and the first day of Lake Travis ISD’s new policy banning the use of cellphones, smartwatches and earbuds during the school day in elementary and middle school.

The ban was announced last month, but Superintendent Paul Norton said the district had been discussing how to manage cellphone use for the last couple years.

“We’ve talked to lots of different groups about this policy and it’s been strongly received in a very positive way,” he said.

Despite that support, Norton said, he has heard from parents who are worried about the ban.

“The biggest and really the only concern we’ve heard is that if there were to be an emergency situation on campus, they want their child to be able to contact them immediately,” he said. “We completely get that [and] respect that.”

Norton said the district has a protocol in place to contact families if an emergency situation arises and that parents can reach their kids by contacting their school’s office.

Consequences for violating the policy

When it comes to enforcement of the policy, Norton said it was important not to put that burden on teachers.

“When there’s consequences that are being dealt out, that’ll be dealt out through the administrative staff,” he said.

Those consequences depend on how often a student violates the policy. The first time it happens, the school will take the phone away for the school day. The second time, the phone will be confiscated and a parent will have to pick it up. For a third violation, a student could get detention or in-school suspension.

Ultimately, Norton said, the hope is the ban improves student performance, encourages kids to interact with each other more and helps with mental health.

A safer environment

Norton said another goal of the policy is to prevent bullying.

“We’ve dealt with students that have made bad choices using their cellphone when it comes to recording certain situations or conversations or events and so this will help eliminate that,” he said. “That’s something that affects the mental health of a child, the social aspect of a child, especially if they’re on the wrong end of those videos.”

About a month before Lake Travis ISD announced the smart device ban, parents urged the district to adopt it. One of those parents was Janelle Suzanne.

“I think that this [policy] goes a long way to protect the school environment, to be a place of learning and growth and safety,” she said.

Suzanne has a son in elementary school and a daughter in middle school. She said she was surprised by how early she needed to start talking to them about technology and social media, even when they didn’t have accounts of their own.

“My daughter in fourth grade had friends with TikTok accounts,” she said, “and she was maybe even appearing on their TikTok accounts or on their YouTube channels.”

According to the U.S. Surgeon General, 40% of kids between the ages of 8 and 12 use social media. That jumps up to 95% for youth between 13 and 17.

Suzanne said she thinks the smart device ban will help kids feel more comfortable because they don’t have to worry about being recorded or photographed just going about their day. She said there was an instance last school year when two middle school students were recorded falling off a platform during theater class.

“It was then passed around,” she said. “Someone edited it to show that fall on repeat, added sound effects, and then those girls were just bullied and it got pretty bad.”

In another instance, Suzanne said, a student didn’t want to eat at school anymore after someone recorded her eating a sandwich and posted it online.

She said the ban will hopefully prevent this from happening, but it’s also important to teach kids how to responsibly use other technology they have access to during the school day.

“Even with the school-issued Chrome Books there can be issues,” she said. “How do we set healthy boundaries at home? What does that look like? So, I think we’re all just trying to figure it out.”

Breaking habits

Lake Travis ISD’s ban on smart devices during the school day is part of a growing trend. Florida, last year, became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law banning cellphone use during class in public schools. Other states, like Indiana and Virginia, have followed suit. Countries like France and New Zealand have similar policies.

Closer to Austin, Killeen ISD has banned cellphones, as has Austin Achieve Public Schools, a charter school network with four campuses.

“We’ve had a no-cellphone policy in classrooms for quite a few years, but we felt like moving to totally device-free was the way to go,” Austin Achieve High School Principal Adrian Edmonds said.

Austin Achieve High School is getting Yondr pouches that students must keep their phones in during the school day.

Austin Achieve will be getting pouches that students will lock their phones in during the school day and keep with them.

Jessie Young, the high school’s assistant principal of culture, said part of the reason for the change was that it was getting hard for teachers to enforce the classroom ban since students could use their phones in the hallways and during lunch.

“We just really felt like this would help our teachers,” she said, “but it would also help our students because they’d be able to focus on class only.”

Young added that when kids had access to their phones during lunch, they’d stare at their devices instead of interact with each other — something Lake Travis ISD is also concerned about.

“Now they’re interacting with each other and playing games and just really socializing a lot more,” she said.

Young said initially there was some pushback when the policy was announced, but that dissipated when students learned they could still have their phones with them — they just had to be off and out of sight.

“You could tell it’s just breaking that habit of constantly being reachable,” she said, “and once they kind of saw and felt what it was like, I feel like the reception’s overall been really good.”

Young said she and Edmonds do get some eye rolls when they tell students to put away their cellphones and airpods as they enter the school, but it’s been going pretty smoothly a couple weeks into the school year. They’ve only had to confiscate about 20 phones, she said, out of hundreds of students.

Edmonds said the response from teachers has also been positive because students aren’t asking to leave class as much to check their phones in the hallway or bathroom.

“Kids can focus on learning, so it’s really great,” she said.

Student achievement

A Pew Research Center poll found 72% of high school teachers surveyed last fall said students being distracted by cellphones in class is a major problem. In contrast, 45% of teenagers said smartphones make it easier to do well in school, according to a Pew survey conducted last year.

But researchers have found student performance improves when cellphones are banned. Rich Murphy, an associate professor of economics at UT Austin, studied the impact of these bans on student test scores by surveying high schools in four cities in England in 2015.

“We found that after schools banned cellphones, student performance on high stakes exams taken at the age of 16 — compared to students at similar schools that didn’t introduce the ban — increased,” he said.

Murphy said researchers determined the impact of the ban was equivalent to having an additional hour of school per week or increasing the school year by five days.

“When we looked into which students were gaining the most from these high school bans, we found it was entirely driven by students with low prior achievement,” he said.

Murphy said top-performing students didn’t seem to be impacted by the bans at all. He added, while they didn’t survey students directly, he and his fellow researcher do have a theory about why certain students did better after cellphones were banned.

“We think distraction is obviously a prime driver of why the mobile phone ban would improve [the performance of students] who maybe find school unengaging,” he said, “and they’re the ones most likely to be distracted by a mobile phone.”

But Murphy said people should be cautious about overgeneralizing the results. He pointed out that they studied schools that chose to ban phones because they likely had the most problems; other schools might not have the same issues.

“Amongst schools that chose to ban phones, they really found an improvement,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that every school would gain a lot from banning mobile phones.”

Lake Travis ISD will be evaluating the effectiveness of its new policy throughout the school year and is looking at expanding it to high school.

“But right now we wanted to concentrate on pre-K through eighth, make sure we have a good launch to this policy at that level and then we’ll move forward from there,” Norton said.

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