No phones, no exceptions: Des Moines school first with outright ban

DES MOINES, Iowa — The words are heavy.

“It’s just been really hard. It’s hard for the kids…”

The language belies the setting.

“Just over time we’ve seen our students just disconnecting more and more…”

What’s going on over at Bergman Academy?

“It’s a withdrawal of anything that you are used to using — there’s going to be a process of getting used to not having it there.”

Alright, spoiler alert: they’re not talking about drugs or depression.

“The research has shown,” says Christie Stover, the head of Bergman Academy, “clearly that cell phones — even when they’re present, just simply present — change a student’s focus.”

They tried confining cell phones to lockers the last two years. That didn’t work.

“It’s the constant peeking,” says Sydney Gerritsen, Bergman’s director of student affairs. “It’s asking to go to the bathroom and then checking their phone on the way.”

Teachers had to double as phone police.

“If a teacher’s dealing with that in the classroom then they’re not fully engaged in the teaching process,” says Katie Ewing, director of admissions.

“The fear of missing out … do I have a message? Have I gotten a notification?” says Gerritson. “And it’s hard for them to be able to separate those things and so we’re making the decision for them.”

This fall, Bergman becomes one of the first schools in the metro to enact a total ban. All students with smart phones or watches will leave them inside a special locker — all day.

“Big problems require bold solutions,” Stover says. “And so we said ‘what if we remove them entirely from the classrooms?’”

Stover says the decision came with the blessing of parents, who added in their own horror stories.

“We had a situation where we were talking with a parent who had taken their child’s phone as a punishment for a period of time,” she recalls, “and the parent said ‘you know, my child always held their phone in their left hand — even without the phone the left hand was essentially useless because the hand was accustomed to holding a phone!’”

The hope is, losing the phone will mean more than losing distractions — it’ll mean gaining real connections.

“We just want people to be more present in the space here,” Ewing says. “More present with the people they’re around every day.”

“It’s gonna be an adjustment,” Stover adds, “but I’m confident that by the end of the year we will have seen a transformation in the learning environment and in our students’ experiences and hopefully they will recognize that it’s a better thing, too.”

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