Educators, parents advocate stricter classroom controls on smartphones
Citing academic and social impacts, Montana schools are increasingly turning their attention to cell phone restrictions and bans.
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by Alex Sakariassen, Montana Free Press
BILLINGS — Throughout the 2023-24 school year, Billings Public Schools Superintendent Erwin Garcia grew increasingly troubled by a sight he repeatedly witnessed in classrooms around the district: students scrolling their smartphones, their attention wrenched from the lessons unfolding before them. His mind turned to the district’s flagging high school test scores, to the national statistics he’d seen on rising rates of anxiety, depression and other disorders among America’s youth, and to the reams of research partly linking such challenges to smartphones and social media.
“There is something that generated all these issues,” Garcia told Montana Free Press last week. “And so as we researched it, I felt this is the time to make a change.”
Students and teachers returning to Billings classrooms next week will find themselves navigating a new district-wide policy governing the presence of smartphones in schools. The restrictions, crafted by Garcia and fellow educators and approved by the school board in July, prohibit high school students from using their phones in class and direct teachers to ensure that phones are deposited in a communal classroom storage space. Elementary and middle school students must turn off and stow their phones in backpacks or lockers for the entirety of the school day.
The policy also extends to wearable devices such as AirPods and Apple Watches, and recommends that students simply refrain from bringing smartphones and other electronic devices to school.
Billings’ new policy highlights a growing call among educators and parents across the state for their local schools to take action in response to student smartphone use. Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte joined that chorus last week by distributing a letter to school administrators and board trustees statewide encouraging them to adopt local policies restricting cell phone use in schools. To bolster his request, Gianforte cited the results of a 2023 survey by the nonprofit Common Sense Media in which 97% of responding students age 11 to 17 reported they’d used their phones during school hours.
“Nationally, and in Montana, we see academic performance declining and rates of mental health disorders, from anxiety and depression to eating disorders, among young people increasing,” Gianfore wrote. “As educators, you see firsthand the strong correlation between time spent on smart devices and these problems, and growing bodies of research prove it.”
According to Executive Director Lance Melton, the Montana School Boards Association has long offered member districts three separate model policies governing phones in schools, ranging from unlimited use to absolute prohibition. Melton added that more than 100 Montana districts have already implemented some sort of restriction or control on in-school smartphone use. Similar measures have been taken in schools throughout the country, including localized bans in New York City and Los Angeles and a statewide prohibition in Florida.
One of those districts — Park City Schools, west of Billings — stepped up its efforts at policing phones last spring by acquiring lockable pouches from the company Yondr. Students in grades 7 and up deposit their smartphones in a pouch at the beginning of the day. The pouches are then magnetically sealed and kept by the student until the end of the day, at which point they can be unsealed at a centralized kiosk. Superintendent Dan Grabowska told MTFP the district directed roughly $6,000 from a school safety grant toward the initiative, and quickly noticed a reduction in reported incidents of school-based cyberbullying during the final quarter of the 2023-24 school year, as well as an increase in student attentiveness.
“Every time that a student gets a notification [on their phone], it takes anywhere from a minute to five minutes for them to get back on track,” Grabowska said. “It was just getting to be really annoying, just a ton of lost teaching time. And we gained almost all of that back in the classrooms. Disruptions were cut way down. The students’ focus was a lot higher.”
Garcia said Billings also looked into acquiring phone pouches from Yondr but determined that the cost to the state’s largest district, an estimated $100,000, was too great, prompting administrators to craft a policy calling for the establishment of classroom storage spaces for phones. Garcia noted that the district’s policy does leave room for case-by-case exemptions, such as for diabetic students who require access to their smartphones to check their glucose levels.
As Billings Public Schools adjusts to its new phone restrictions, educators in Missoula are considering heightened controls of their own. Last week, Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Micah Hill unveiled to board trustees a timeline for the crafting and potential adoption of a district-wide smartphone policy. The plan calls for surveys, data collection and public meetings to be conducted throughout the fall, culminating in an early winter draft and proposed implementation at the start of the 2025-26 school year.
The movement in Missoula was largely spurred by a group of parents and teachers who, throughout the spring and early summer, began compiling their own research on the issue. For Erika Peterman, one of the parents spearheading the effort, last spring was a tipping point. She’d recently read social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” and, as a parent of two, was already keenly aware of how ingrained smartphones and social media have become in the lives of young people. Herself a former MCPS student, Peterman even encouraged her 17-year-old son to circulate a petition among his peers to turn their high school into a cell-phone-free space.
“He just thought I was crazy,” Peterman said. “Then I realized how silly it was for me to be asking my son to do this when we really just need adults and parents to be stepping up and removing distraction from kids who are trying to learn in school.”
Convinced of the addictive nature of smartphones and the detriments such technology can have, particularly on developing minds, Peterman and fellow parent Morgan Stemberger teamed up this year to form the Smartphone-Free Schools Working Group. They surveyed more than 100 Missoula educators regarding the prevalence of phone-related incidents in local classrooms and found that 85% of respondents agreed smartphones distracted students from their learning at least once a day. Written responses from numerous participants recounted a hodgepodge of classroom-based approaches, from using centralized “caddies” for phone storage to requiring that phones be turned off and stowed in backpacks. The responses also documented the challenges teachers anticipate in implementing school-wide phone bans, including parental pushback and elevated anxiety among kids conditioned to regular smartphone access.
A similar survey of parents conducted by the group generated nearly 250 responses, with 93% saying it is important for MCPS to educate students on healthy smartphone habits. More than two-thirds indicated their belief that smartphones have a significant impact on children receiving a quality education. Peterman and her cohorts presented the findings to district administrators, setting the stage for Hill’s proposed timeline last week.
The survey results have only strengthened Peterman’s conviction that smartphones are an “experience blocker” for all ages, hindering social engagement and dragging attention away from other activities like reading and art. She said the challenge is especially acute for students, as so much of their social lives unfold through social media, which is why she believes an MCPS policy is so critical. Restricting smartphone use for all kids would put the entire student population on equal footing, she said, eliminating inequities created by scattershot enforcement or unequal access to smartphones among students.
While she’s relieved the district is advancing the issue, Peterman said she’d prefer to see a policy in place sometime this school year, and joined other concerned parents and teachers last week in expressing frustration to the MCPS board over the length of the district’s implementation timeline. In Peterman’s view, parents and educators “don’t have any time to waste.”
“I feel like the school’s on fire and the adults are sitting around talking about what we’re going to do about it,” Peterman said. “I don’t feel like we have a year. I feel like every year that passes — even every day that passes — our kids aren’t learning, our communities are suffering, our teachers can’t teach, and we’re just going to continue to talk about it when we know what the problem is.”
