Getting used to ‘cellphone-free education’ may be just as hard for parents as it is for teenagers

Kristi Strange used to send her sons occasional text messages during the school day.

“A little mom text,” she said, smiling at the boys sitting next to her on the couch. “Just like, ‘I love you, I hope you’re having a great day.’”

“Or, you know, ‘You’ve got to get this done ASAP,'” Rhys, 17, interrupted. “‘You’ve got grades missing.’”

That was before Roanoke County tightened its cellphone use policy for students.

“I can’t really do that this year,” she said. Now she waits to check in with her boys — her younger son, Aidan, is 15 — when they get home from Hidden Valley High School. Or she can text them, knowing they can check their phones at lunch.

Families like the Stranges are adapting as school divisions look at their mobile device policies with renewed focus.

Roanoke County finalized its new cellphone policy two days before the start of the school year. Previously, high school students could use their mobile devices in classrooms at each teacher’s discretion; the new policy bans cellphones during class but allows students to use their phones between classes and during lunch. A student who repeatedly violates the policy can be made to turn in their phone to the front office each morning for as long as the remainder of the school year.

Cellphone policies vary among school divisions, and can also vary by grade level within a single division. But Virginia is expected to soon establish statewide rules for student cellphone use that would be stricter than what most school divisions currently enforce.

Under an executive order from Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the education department is poised to try to ban student cellphone use during the entire school day. The move comes as the state deals with lagging recovery from pandemic learning loss, and in tandem with nationwide calls to rein in youth cellphone use in order to protect mental health.

At least 13 states have passed laws or enacted policies that significantly restrict student cellphone use at K-12 public schools, according to an analysis by Education Week.

Much of the dialogue around restricting youth cellphone use has sprung from “The Anxious Generation,” a book by Jonathan Haidt published in March. The social psychologist and New York University business school professor describes an ongoing mental health crisis among members of Generation Z — people age 12 to 30 right now — due to smartphones and easy access to the internet and social media. The positive response to the book by education leaders around the nation has been feverish; the governor of Arkansas sent copies of the book to every other U.S. governor.

But getting students to look up from their phones and pay attention in class has proven to be more difficult than school administrators probably anticipated in the early days of smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and the various other devices students have grown accustomed to using to communicate with friends and family and go online.

Now, as Virginia considers forcing students to go phone-free for the entire school day, educators must prepare for a major adjustment. Young people and their parents, many of whom are digital natives themselves — and who became used to near-constant contact during the early COVID years — might struggle to break the connection.

There’s been little pushback to the idea that students shouldn’t use their cellphones during class.

But the Sept. 4 school shooting that killed two students and two teachers in Georgia has reignited debate, in Virginia and elsewhere, over total cellphone bans, as reports have circulated about how terrified students trapped at Apalachee High School texted their parents while waiting for help to arrive.

The following day, Heritage High School in Lynchburg was locked down after graffiti discovered in a school restroom claimed, “I’m going to shoot us up.”

Conversation in a local Facebook group about the incident reflected confusion and frustration about how parents were notified about the lockdown and eventual early dismissal.

One person identifying themselves as a student at Heritage criticized the school for how it handled the lockdown. “I assume most parents found out from their children,” they wrote.

* * *

Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s push to restrict cellphone use in schools is the latest move in his ongoing focus on youth mental health. Executive Order 33, which Youngkin signed on July 9, seeks to “promote the health and safety” of K-12 students in the commonwealth.

“Studies indicate that students who use their phones during class learn less and achieve lower grades,” the order states. “The issue extends beyond mere distraction; substantial phone and social media use can have a cumulative, lasting, and detrimental impact on adolescents’ ability to focus and engage in their studies.”

It directed the Virginia Department of Education to establish guidance for “cellphone-free education” and to coordinate with the state health department to distribute information about the negative impacts of youth cellphone and social media use.

Draft guidance that the Department of Education released Aug. 15 recommends that student cellphones be off and away during the “bell to bell” school day across grade levels. It says that parents should call the school office if they need to get a message to their child during the school day, and that schools should train students on appropriate use of school-issued technology devices such as laptops.

The Department of Education is collecting feedback through Sept. 15 before releasing final guidance that school divisions must follow by Jan. 1. The final state guidance is intended as the minimum on which to build local policies.

The research cited by Virginia state agencies about the importance of limiting cellphone use in schools in the age of always-on internet and social media is alarming, including claims of an exponential increase in adolescent depression and suicide since 2010.

But most of the research on the effects of phones and social media on young people is correlational, notes the U.S. surgeon general’s 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health, meaning, for instance, that it can’t draw a direct connection between social media use and depression. And most research on the topic so far doesn’t focus on children and adolescents.

But, the surgeon general’s report concludes: “Our children and adolescents don’t have the luxury of waiting years until we know the full extent of social media’s impact.”

This summer, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for warning labels on social media apps , similar to those printed on cigarette packs, stating that social media use is associated with mental health risks for young people.

Shalini Misra, an associate professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech, studies environmental and social psychology. She summed up why there’s such widespread concern about children’s and teens’ use of cellphones and social media when many adults are just as attached to their own mobile devices.

“Because they’re young, their brains are still developing,” Misra said, and it’s hard for kids to manage the stimulation and the constant flow of information that can come from a smartphone. The part of the brain that handles executive functioning — tasks like problem solving, organization and paying attention — is still growing.

Adults can also struggle  with that constant flow of information, but their executive functioning is more developed, Misra said. “They have a higher impulse control, higher ability to manage and regulate their emotions.”

Many social media apps allow users as young as 13 to sign up for an account, Misra, who has a teenager at home, pointed out. But that doesn’t mean a 13-year-old is ready to participate.

“They don’t have the … brainpower to be able to handle that,” she said.

* * *

Connor Stawarz and his mother, Rebeka Stawarz, aren’t big cellphone users.

At least, they don’t think they are.

“You can ask Connor. I don’t stay on my phone much,” Stawarz said. She thinks phones are often a waste of energy and time. “Once you get into it, you can’t get out of it.”

Connor, a senior at John S. Battle High School in Bristol, sat up straight next to his mother on a Zoom interview in mid-August, waiting for a moment to interject.

“I love my mom, don’t get me wrong,” he said, shaking his head, a thick mop of brown hair swinging over his forehead. “But she is on her phone quite a lot when it comes to work-related stuff.”

“Now, that’s different,” Stawarz said, smiling.

“At night, I do tend to catch my mom on Instagram.”

“Yeah, I get on Instagram before I go to bed, and then I find myself sucked into it,” Rebeka Stawarz said. If she spends more than about 30 minutes on the app, “I get very mad at myself,” she said.

Connor said he uses his phone mostly for online shopping — he collects rare sneakers — and communicating with his girlfriend and classmates. He said he doesn’t feel stressed if he can’t check his phone for a while.

But he then admitted that he scrolls through Instagram for two to three hours a day.

That realization was “embarrassing,” he said. He doesn’t even post any photos or videos of his own. He just views what others have posted.

“I could be using the time for other activities. I could go to the gym. I could study. I could learn a new skill. It’s really just to kill time.”

He makes a conscious decision never to look at his phone’s data on how much time he’s spent on each app and on using the phone in general.

“I do not want to know how long I’ve been on it.”

Washington County’s cellphone rule, implemented in 2016, allows high schoolers to use phones between classes, at lunch and during class “for instructional purposes” under a teacher’s supervision.

This year, the division is making a more concerted effort to enforce the rules. Superintendent Keith Perrigan said the division is seeking community input before changing its cellphone policy, including feedback from students. Once the state’s final guidance is released, it’ll be up to the school board to approve the county schools’ phone policy.

Members of Perrigan’s student advisory team and student representatives to the school board said that social media apps get frequent use among students chatting in groups, including sports teams — and that students and their parents use them to communicate as well. Snapchat is a popular one, said Olivia Miranda, a junior at Patrick Henry High School in Glade Spring.

Olivia is responsible for driving a younger neighbor home from school each day. She takes college classes at another site in the afternoons, so she can’t simply catch up with him in the halls between classes to talk about last-minute schedule changes.

“It’s really important for me to stay in touch with him, so that I’m able to know if I need to get him,” she said.

Cases like Olivia’s illustrate why it’s important to hear from students, Perrigan said. If cellphone use ends up banned during the entire school day, the schools will have to determine alternate communication methods for a variety of situations, like for sports teams that use apps to announce practice schedules and weather cancellations.

Washington County school administrators said that their current policy has increased student engagement and reduced distractions. More concerted efforts at enforcing the policy should further those positive outcomes, but it requires buy-in from the whole school community, not just students.

Jimmy King, principal at Battle High School, said that frequent communication between students and parents has presented a challenge at his school. Driven students, the ones juggling dual-enrollment college classes or a host of extracurricular activities, might be able to manage the flow. But others may have a harder time disconnecting from their phones. And that creates challenges for administrators — especially when parents are on the other end of the phone.

“It amazes me,” King said, describing parents sending students 20 or 30 text messages a day, or sharing social media posts, with students often responding to them.

Once when he was conducting an evaluation in a classroom, a student’s phone rang.

It was the student’s mother.

“I actually answered the phone,” he said. “I said, ‘Hello, it’s Jimmy King, principal.’” The line went silent. “I said, ‘She’s in class now, but I’m sitting next to her, and I’ll let her know you called.’”

King said the parent hung up on him.

***

Misra once conducted a study on the impact of the mere presence of mobile devices on social interaction. She found that when two people were having a conversation, and at least one participant had their phone in their hand or out on the table between them, the quality of the conversation diminished.

“They said that they shared less empathy with one another,” she said. “That they felt less connected with one another.” And the stronger the relationship between the two people, the more the phone was an impediment, she said.

Her study was published 10 years ago , before Instagram allowed users to post temporary “stories,” before TikTok even existed.

In a listening session in Roanoke County in late July, Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Lisa Coons and several attendees mentioned Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” Despite criticism of the book , which some experts have called a simplistic take on the youth mental health crisis, many educators and parents see it as a playbook for fixing America’s youngest kids before they fall too far down the social media rabbit hole.

Haidt offers a four-pronged approach to curing adolescent attachment to their phones: Don’t give your kids smartphones before high school. Don’t let them get on social media before they’re 16. Keep phones out of schools. And let kids be more independent.

Misra said she agrees with a lot of what Haidt writes, but says a broader approach may be more effective than his exact prescription. A blanket ban on phone use during the school day won’t necessarily help a young person avoid information overload when they switch on their phone on the bus ride home. And once they finish school, workplaces don’t exactly welcome employees who don’t check their email all day. Cutting kids off from technology completely isn’t a realistic answer to challenges that will still exist in their adult lives.

Instead, she recommends parents and children talk about the purpose of a cellphone and set goals for using one before making that major purchase. That requires some self-reflection for parents as well as children, both of whom may have come to see smartphone and other electronic use as a reward for good behavior.

Haidt will join Virginia first lady Suzanne Youngkin for a “fireside chat” to discuss “The Anxious Generation” on Sept. 19. The Education Department will livestream the event at participating public schools.

As of Sept. 6, 26 school divisions had at least one location on the list.

* * *

Rhys Strange and his younger brother both got cellphones two years ago, when Aidan turned 13 and Rhys was 15. That meant Rhys got a phone later than many of his friends. “In a way, he was punished” for having to wait until Aidan was old enough for a phone, their father, Michael Strange, said.

Over the course of two interviews, one on Zoom and one in their home in south Roanoke County, the boys never glanced at the phones in their pockets. Aidan said fewer texts from his mom during the school day could give the brothers “more self-reliance” to complete the tasks she used to remind them about.

But they were honest about the prevalence of phones in their daily lives. “Not many people are bringing books to school or anything to do” during downtime each day, Rhys said. “They just have their phones.”

Two weeks into the school year, Aidan and Rhys said the new cellphone rules seemed to be working at their school. The punishment is clear if a phone is out during class. No one wants their phone taken away.

The state draft guidance banning cellphone use during the day seemed extreme to them. “They get detention and they lose their phone, and it’s effective,” under the county’s latest rule for high school students, Aidan said. “So I don’t feel the need to go even further.”

In the first week after the state released its draft guidance that would keep cellphones off and away during the school day at all grade levels, the Department of Education received more than 1,400 comments via an online form . The “overwhelming majority” of comments supported the “bell to bell” approach, Todd Reid, department spokesperson, said in an email Aug. 29.

But the Strange boys are still skeptical. “A lot of the things they’re trying to keep from happening in school still happen outside school. Like vaping, people on their phones, bullying,” Aidan said. “People find a way, if they truly want to.”

Their father is sympathetic to teachers who have to enforce policies that sometimes put an adult between a student and a piece of expensive personal property.

“They’re digital natives at this point. The genie is out of the bottle. So for a teacher to play that cop role in the classroom … it’s one more thing that they have to deal with,” he said.

* * *

When safety comes into play, conversations about student cellphone access become even more stressful.

Kristi Strange said she’s concerned about not being able to reach her sons if there’s an emergency at their school. “It’s the norm to be able, if there’s anything wrong, to be able to reach out to your child,” she said in late August.

It made Aidan and Rhys nervous, too, when the school board discussed increasing phone restrictions over the summer. “They were immediately anxious to have that connection broken,” she said.

She had an even stronger response the day after the Georgia school shooting: “We will not comply with any policy that removes or limits our kids’ access to their phones until this no longer happens,” she said.

At the late July listening session on school cellphone use in Roanoke, parents largely agreed that phones didn’t belong in the classroom but were divided over whether kids should have access to phones at all during the day. Having a direct line of communication with their child was efficient for their busy families, some said. Others feared a worst-case scenario, in which they couldn’t verify their children’s safety, or students couldn’t get to their phones to call 911.

But one teacher commented that students having easy access to their phones “made it a disaster” when there was a fire at her school. Some students were so busy calling or texting their parents that they didn’t pay attention to the emergency instructions that their teachers were giving them, she said.

Strange contends that taking phones off the table completely removes opportunities for young people to learn when it’s appropriate to use their phones — and to learn the consequences of doing so when it’s not, she said.

If phones are taken away during the day completely or put in bags students can’t access, which Danville schools recently started doing , “That, to me, that’s easy,” she said. “To me, that doesn’t teach our kids control, discipline and respect.”

Connor Stawarz agrees. He’s nearly 18. He has a car. Many of his classmates have jobs. He supports phones being away during class, “because it lets you focus on your teacher.”

But he thinks high school is a good time to learn when to be on your phone and when not to be.

His mother sees it from the perspective of an educator as well as parent. She’s a reading specialist at High Point Elementary School in Washington County. Keeping young students’ attention is hard, she said, and cellphones don’t help, especially when she sees students getting them earlier and earlier.

“They’re supposed to not have them [at school], they’re supposed to be in the bags. … But still you hear alarms going off on kids’ phones,” Rebeka Stawarz said. She said employees aren’t  supposed to go into students’ bookbags, but if the students are away from the classroom — in gym class, for instance — “the alarm just keeps going off and going off.”

After a while, she said, you have to look for the alarm.

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