Last week, administrators at the Southampton School District reviewed the student cellphone policies across their buildings — raising differing ideologies, noting concerns and contemplating the road ahead.
And it was not a conversation unique to them.
“This is a large discussion that is taking place across the country, at the state level and the local level,” Southampton High School Principal Dr. Brian Zahn said during a recent Board of Education meeting. “So what we decided to do is take a look at some of the research and what we’re seeing in these trends to help us as we make some decisions moving forward.”
Over the summer, Dr. Nick Epley, a newly appointed assistant principal at the intermediate school, took a deep dive into the statistics surrounding teen cellphone use and the adjacent mental health crisis.
According to The Anxious Generation, since 2010, anxiety and depression in school-age children have increased 134 percent and 106 percent, respectively. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face twice the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, according to a report from the U.S. Surgeon General — and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours.
“I’m a father of four children, they’re all the elementary level,” Epley said. “But as a parent, I’m noticing that sense of dependency on technology already. Cellphones and technology in general has so many benefits, education purposes, and as a parent, I see the positives to it as well. But I’m noticing my 9-year-old daughter and my 8-year-old son and my 6-year-old, and even my 4-year-old, they’re so dependent on being near that phone.
“As an administrator of a school and as an educator, it’s something that we need to teach our students to live with,” he added. “This is the real world moving forward.”
At the high school, a series of signs remind students when and where to not use their phones. Red signs designate instructional spaces, where cellphones and other electronic devices are not to be used, seen or heard, while yellow signs say that cellphone use is prohibited in the hallways during instructional time.
“I’ve had custodians, security staff tell me how nice it is to see kids talking to each other in the hallway,” High School Assistant Principal Irene Navas said. “So that’s been a nice change from last year.”
Green signs list ways to responsibly use a cellphone in a permitted space, such as “Turn off your phone if it will be interrupting a conversation,” “Taking pictures, videos, recordings without permission is not allowed,” and “Refrain from posting on social media platform.”
Some teachers have also incorporated units that instruct students to research mental health and social media statistics to better understand the issues at hand, administrators explained.
“There’s an argument that cellphones aren’t going to go away,” Navas said, “so should we teach our children how to manage them now, or do we just get rid of them and try to figure it out?”
At the high school, cellphones are not allowed to be used in academic settings, while the intermediate school policy is even stricter: the use of cellphones and other smart devices is banned during school hours. Devices must be in a locker or turned off and put into a book bag.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2020, cellphone bans were in place in 76 percent of schools across the country. At least 13 states have passed laws or enacted policies that ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools statewide, or recommend local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies, reported an Education Week analysis.
And over 70 percent of high school teachers in the United States have said that cellphones are a major distraction in the classroom, according to the National Education Association.
“Unfortunately, I’ve been through this before,” explained Southampton Board of Education member Ruth White-Dunne, who is a history teacher at Pierson Middle-High School in Sag Harbor, “this whole controversy and the conflicts and the research — and Sag Harbor pulled it off, and we haven’t looked back since.”
Last year, the Sag Harbor School District became the first in Suffolk County to ban access to cellphones while school is in session, by way of Yondr pouches, which lock a phone in a student’s possession. They can only be reopened at the end of the school day by a small, handheld circular device similar to the mechanism used to remove security tags from clothing sold in retail stores.
“We are very interested in hearing the perceptions of our community, our parents, our guardians, our teachers, even our students on the topic,” Zahn said. “We plan to send out a community survey asking our community members about their perceptions on specific items related to cell phone use in schools.”
Michelle Trauring on Sep 25, 2024