Inside math teacher Michelle Krummel’s classroom, Myers Park High School Principal Robert Folk points to the wall by the door of her room, where there's a lockbox with dozens of thin slots. It’s empty right now, but when class is in session, it's filled with students’ cellphones.
“As students enter, they pull their cellphones out, open the door, put their cellphone in a slot. There are 36 slots, but we also have room for additional phones if we have any classrooms over 36. The teacher then ...shuts the locker and locks it," he said.
Starting this school year, there’s a locker like this in every classroom at Myers Park, all funded by the school’s Parent Teacher Student Organization (PTSO). Folk argues the boxes have helped teachers more consistently enforce the school’s cellphone policy, which allows students to keep their phones in between classes and during lunch, but not during classroom time.
“We had a procedure for all students to have their cellphones turned off in the classroom and put away,” Folk said. “However, what we were finding was classrooms were not consistent with the process, students were not consistent with the process. Therefore, there were distractions in the classroom.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has a districtwide policy banning cellphones during class time, and in recent years has sought to firm up enforcement. But individual schools are left to decide how to enforce that ban. On the one hand, that gives local schools the flexibility to decide on policies that work best for their students. On the other hand, it can leave schools with different approaches.
Districts across the state all have their own policies regulating cellphones, but each varies in implementation. The Wake County public school system, for instance, has no districtwide policy on phones, but rather lets individual schools create their own policies. Some have been pushing to change that.
On the other end of the spectrum, Rock Hill Schools have a districtwide policy requiring phones to be turned off and stored away the whole school day. At Union County Schools, students in kindergarten through 9th grade follow similar rules. Once they hit high school, however, students can use their phones during class change and lunch.
Educators across the country are grappling with how to respond to phones’ growing impact on student attention, mental health and behavior. And there’s no real consensus on what works best. States such as Florida, Ohio and Indiana have passed legislation banning phones in recent years. But some experts are skeptical about overreaching bans.
“We have a history of seeing bans occur and then kind of changing our mind about it or rethinking it,” said Krista Glazewski, executive director of the William and Ida Friday Institute at NC State, which studies education policy across the state. “So, I guess I would also offer maybe, let’s leave room that we may want to rethink it or revisit it with an open mind.”
It’s clear that educators see cellphones as a significant distraction — 72% of U.S. high school teachers agree with that, according to a recent Pew Research survey.
But Glazewski urges schools to consider the complex tradeoffs. Incorporating phones into the educational experience could help students learn more responsible technology use. Parents sometimes prefer their students to have phones during the day in case of emergencies. And a lack of consistent schoolwide enforcement policies may put more pressure on teachers.
“I think that’s where my biggest concern is: Let’s don’t add more responsibility and burden to teachers, and let’s really take responsibility administratively from leadership to have a localized policy that seems to work best for our kids and our local classroom,” Glazewski said.
The broad range of opinions was on display at a recent summit, hosted by the Friday Institute. Granville County Schools superintendent Stan Winborne said that since his district implemented strict bans on cellphone use during instructional time, the district has seen drops in discipline rates and suspensions. Others, like state Superintendent of Public Instruction Cathy Truitt cautioned that outright bans have unintended consequences.
“When we ban things, we create groups,” Truitt said. “We create groups who are in favor and those who oppose. And then we often attach some sort of morality to that.”
Jill Payne, associate superintendent of student services at CMS, says the district believes its policy sets a standard across the whole system, while giving principals the flexibility to figure out their own procedures.
“Our principals are strong leaders in the building and so we give them the autonomy to figure out those processes, and then they communicate with us if there’s needs that they have,” she said.
At Myers Park, the locker system came about as a collaboration between Folk and the PTSO in part to respond to concern about phones’ impact on student mental health, according to Rebecca Drendel, a past president of the PTSO who helped organize the effort.
“It just seemed like this perfect opportunity to do something good for our kids academically, follow the CMS policy and improve mental health outcomes,” Drendel said.
But Drendel and her former co-president Ghazale Johnston say they know they were lucky to have a PTSO willing to fund the initiative. Other schools may not be so fortunate.
“I definitely think it is a priority, or should be a priority, across our district, across our state,” Johnston said. “I think we’re going to see increasingly more and more examples where that priority gets enforced by devices, and by funding that is going to be necessary.”
There are a whole host of other devices and approaches that can be employed to regulate cellphone use. Bill Dean, a grandparent to CMS students who spent a few years as a substitute, says he was struck by how difficult it was to regulate cellphone use in classrooms, and how students used phones for bullying. He supports using magnetic pouches, which lock up cellphones for the whole day, bell-to-bell. Students carry the pouches around but cannot access their phones until they leave the building.
“I watched kids go between classes, and they’re not looking at each other,” Dean said. “I mean, yes, you want them to get to class, but you also want some social interaction happening in between class.”
But at least at Myers Park, even students have found the locker system seems to be working. Cassidy Black, a junior, says she’s found that not even having the option during class has helped her be more responsible with her phone — and more social with her classmates.
“Whenever I’m not working on something now, I will talk to people next to me and start work for other classes," Black said. "It’s definitely made me more productive, so I have seen a lot of benefits.”
