In a move championed by educators, dreaded by many students, and mandated by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the East Hampton School Board last week officially approved a ban on student use of smartphones and internet-enabled devices during the school day. It will take effect at the start of the school year.
The statewide “bell to bell” ban was approved this spring, but the school district had been weighing such a move long before that. “We didn’t just decide on this willy-nilly,” the high school principal, Sara Smith, said Tuesday. “This was a year of research and pondering and deciding what would be the best way forward for us.”
“Our primary concern in East Hampton is the mental health and wellness of our students, and we have engaged in a lot of the research that suggests and unequivocally proves that there is a direct connection with cellphone use, particularly social media, and a rise in rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents,” Ms. Smith said. “We strongly believe that limiting students’ access to that is protecting them” from those outcomes.
The policy adopted last week brings the district in line with state requirements by prohibiting the use of cellphones and other internet-connected devices in school and on school grounds throughout the instructional day, including during homeroom, lunch, recess, and study halls, with only a handful of exceptions.
Students will be able to use internet-enabled laptops issued by the school. They may also use cellphones or other personal devices “if authorized by a teacher, principal, or the district for a specific educational purpose.”
Exceptions to the ban will be made in case of emergency, if the devices are “necessary for the management of a student’s health care,” and on a case-by-case basis when a student is a caregiver responsible for another family member. They will be allowed for “translation services” and when they are part of students’ individualized educational plans or are otherwise needed to accommodate students with disabilities.
How students’ phones and other devices are stored during the day will differ by school. At the John M. Marshall Elementary School, where fewer of the prekindergartners through fifth graders have their own phones, devices will be stored in an area of the main office. At the middle school, they’ll be in lockers or in secure areas of the main office, and at the high school, all students will need to place their phones, smart watches, even their wireless earbuds in locking pouches that the district has ordered from the company Yondr, at a cost of $50,000. This is the same company that
makes the pouches already used at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor.
When they get to the building each day, students will pick up their pouches in the front hall, and place their devices inside them, in a process overseen by “all available staff,” including security guards, clerical and administrative staff, and teachers, Ms. Smith said. “Depending on the day this could be roughly seven to 10 people.”
Pouches will be locked, but students will be able to carry those pouches with them all day. “We found that this is a more student-centered and humane way to say, ‘You can’t be on your phone, but we’re not going to physically take it away from you,’ “ Ms. Smith said. “At the end of the day when they’re headed to buses, to sports, to clubs, they can unlock their Yondr pouches and get their phones.”
The administration recognizes that the changes will be a challenge for parents who have grown accustomed to being able to contact their children directly to make after-school plans and for students who forget their lunch or their cleats or their homework. “Logistically, it is going to be a difficult adjustment for families,” the principal acknowledged. “So much of the communication about the family schedule happens via text throughout the day. . . . Families will have to have those conversations before school or after school.”
But that won’t always happen, and to accommodate that, the high school will be adding phones in the main office that students can use to call out of the building. “We have met with our secretarial staff and explained that, yes, the volume of phone calls is going to go up because parents are going to need to get in touch with their children.”
And in the case of a real emergency like a fire or worse, or even something like an unexpected early dismissal because of snow, “our teachers will have, secure in their classrooms,” a device to unlock the Yondr pouches “so that parents can communicate with their children,” Ms. Smith said.
The underlying point is for students “to focus on school while they’re in school,” she said. “While we may think we can multitask, phones can be very distracting.” She related something she heard from a student with a sibling at Pierson: Even though students there were resistant, too, many find “they are engaging with each other and talking. . . . We want students to be able to do that.”
Giving them a forced break from their smartphones might also help break an addictive cycle, Ms. Smith said. “I personally think that there’s almost a muscle memory element of cellphones, and our bodies and our kids’ bodies are naturally reaching for them all the time.” The Yondr pouches are a “strategy” to “retrain our muscle memory.”
A study published last month in the medical journal JAMA and cited in a recent New York Times article found a correlation between “addictive use of social media, mobile phones, or video games” and “suicidal behaviors and ideation and worse mental health.” That study followed more than 4,000 adolescents over four years, and concluded that those at the highest risk “were those who told researchers their use of technology had become ‘addictive’ — that they had trouble putting it down, or felt the need to use it more and more,” according to The Times.
“I know there’s mixed opinions about this, but I think it is an adjustment we can all collectively make for the sake of our children and preventing as best we can cellphone addiction,” Ms. Smith said. She talked about the annual buildOn service-learning trips, on which students travel to impoverished areas overseas to help build a school. At the beginning of every trip, students turn their smartphones over to the chaperones, and they always say that not having their phones helped them “fully engage in what was going on and be present,” Ms. Smith said.
She has already held one parent meeting explaining the new rules and expects to do more before the start of school. It will also be discussed at the ninth-grade orientation in August.
News of the Board
In other news from the school board’s July 8 organizational meeting, the board re-elected J.P. Foster as president and chose two vice presidents, Christina DeSanti, who was already in that role, and Sarah Minardi. Pursuant to another new state rule, the board will also welcome a student as an ex-officio member — Stella Brecker, who is president of the student association at the high school.
Work to install a new playground at the elementary school, approved by voters in May, is set to begin next month. Money for the project will come from the district’s capital reserve fund. Also part of that proposition was a new science research lab at the high school. The timeline for that project was not discussed last week.