In the last years of Jill Haffley’s teaching career, her lessons were increasingly punctuated by the buzz of a text message, sometimes even a “cacophony of noises” as students’ cellphones erupted with rings and dings.
Those weren’t the only disruptions or distractions in her classes. Some of her students would tune into a Netflix show or YouTube videos. Others played video games. All on their cellphones, heads bent down.
She also remembers teens who would ask to go to the bathroom during class, where they would meet a friend to record TikTok videos.
“There was no sanctity to the classroom anymore,” said Haffley, who was elected to Colorado Springs School District 11’s school board in November and campaigned on a platform to rid schools of rampant cellphone use.
District 11 is one of a growing number of Colorado districts cracking down on students using cellphones during class and, in some cases, even during lunch and passing periods. Cellphone bans in schools have also flared up in debates across the country as teachers fight for students’ attention in the age of Snapchat, Instagram and rapid-fire texting. Devices in the hands of teens are often thought of as little more than distractions that divert their gaze to social media posts or chats about weekend plans — or shortcuts that give them a sneaky way to look up answers for a test.
There’s another side to the technology: a communication portal at a time students’ sense of school safety has been fractured through repeated security threats, school shootings and hoaxes.
Officials in District 11 say the district charged forward with a cellphone ban in schools this year largely to reinforce student safety, especially during emergencies when students might whip out their phones and begin exchanging information that has yet to be verified.
“The spread of misinformation that can happen with cellphones in the time of an emergency can be pretty dangerous,” district spokesperson Jessica Wise told The Colorado Sun. “It instills a panic that shuts us down from following the protocols, from listening and being attentive where we need to be.”
The district of about 22,700 students in preschool through high school has never enforced a districtwide cellphone policy. Attitudes toward cellphones have varied among individual schools and classrooms.
Now, district officials are imposing stricter rules after the board voted in June to adopt a cellphone ban based on input from the community and board work sessions. Elementary school students must keep cellphones and smartwatches in their backpacks at all times. Middle and high school students must tuck their phones and other smart devices into a magnetized pouch — called a Yondr pouch — that locks itself. As they arrive at school each day, students secure their phone inside their pouch and show it to security officers, Wise said.
Staff will confiscate the phones of students caught using their devices during school hours and return them at the end of the day. Students can face suspension if they violate the new rules more than once.
Students can unlock their pouches using unlocking stations when they leave school for field trips, internships or lunch. But they will not be able to access their phones during passing periods or during lunch in the cafeteria.
“We want kids to succeed,” said Haffley, the teacher-turned-school board member. “And one of the ways to do that is to tighten up attendance, tighten up behavior and certainly take away the very thing that keeps their focus off of their academics and that’s the cellphone.”
Some teens say cellphone bans punish the wrong students
Districts across Colorado take a variety of approaches to monitoring how and when students use cellphones at school — some more stringent than others — with local school boards adopting their own policies. Aspen School District and Littleton Public Schools have also decided to implement their own versions of cellphone bans this school year. Other districts, such as Denver Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools, leave decisions about student privileges around using cellphones up to each school.
The Colorado Department of Education does not track cellphone bans in Colorado districts, according to department spokesperson Jeremy Meyer.
More districts will likely prohibit student use of cellphones during school in the future, Colorado Association of School Boards director Jubal Yennie said, citing a national trend.
“School boards have to at least address this issue for their teachers and students,” Yennie said. “There’s going to be more conversation.”
The question of the role smartphones play in children’s development and education has become an increasingly pressing one as technology has rapidly advanced. At least one expert sees a very narrow space for cellphones in schools.
Dr. Michael Rich is an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has studied the effects of media and devices for more than 30 years.
“The only place for phones in school as I see it is to teach the kids how to use this powerful device the same way we teach them to control and direct another powerful device, an automobile,” said Rich, who recently wrote a book about raising children in a smartphone-obsessed world. “And we do that by first of all waiting until it is a tool that they need and can use responsibly and they can use it with respect for themselves and others, and that really means understanding how what you put online goes far, goes fast and is sticky.”
In Aspen, some students said they were taken aback after what they describe as an abrupt shift to their school district’s cellphone guidelines introduced by their new superintendent over the summer.
Cellphones have technically always been banned in classrooms, but the school is now enforcing the rule. Superintendent Tharyn Mulberry said teachers have added cellphone holders to their classrooms with pockets where students can stash their phones during class. The district has also encouraged parents of elementary schoolers to hold off on buying their children a cellphone until they are older.
Still, the district has struggled to keep students off their phones, including during lunch, Mulberry said. That’s why Aspen School District will no longer allow students to have their phones out during any part of the school day, including passing periods and lunch. If a staff member spots a student’s cellphone, that phone will be confiscated and only returned to the student when a parent comes to pick it up.
Colby Vanderaa, a senior at Aspen High School and a student liaison to the school board, said she does not altogether oppose outlawing cellphones in schools, but she believes district officials made a hasty decision without thinking through all the impacts on kids, particularly high schoolers.
She relies on her phone to stay on top of her schedule, getting notifications from coaches when they change the time they want students to leave for a game or race and communicating with directors from her local theater troupe.
“It honestly feels like they’re punishing the kids who already had good cellphone behavior because those are the kids who are going to listen to the policy,” Colby said. “It’s not going to teach kids better behaviors.”
Mulberry, who previously served as principal at Aspen High School, recognizes how much students incorporate their phones into their daily lives to stay in contact with their parents and coordinate activities, but he also sees how much students have to gain from being phone-free bell to bell.
“Everybody’s looking at this as, ‘oh, they’re losing their phones,’” Mulberry said. “And I’m going to challenge that assumption. Giving the kids the opportunity to concentrate a bit more might improve their academic performance and also their enjoyment of what’s happening in the classroom.”
Ryley Benson, who is starting his junior year at Aspen High School this week, worries about how he’ll arrange a ride home to Carbondale after school without much access to his phone during the school day. While his dad works at Aspen Mountain and is slammed during ski season, his mom teaches at the high school and sometimes has medical appointments after work. Other days, she heads to Aspen Airport after school to work a shift loading and unloading luggage.
Ryley, 15, typically texts with his parents to figure out transportation.
Otherwise, he said he silences his phone and sets it aside during class to show respect to his teachers.
“I have no problem with not checking it for my 80-minute class,” he said.
Applause from teachers. A mix of reactions from parents.
The tighter cellphone rules come as a relief to Aspen teachers like Marc Whitley.
Whitley, who teaches science courses at Aspen High School, said his classes have recently been full of more friction as he has had to regularly take time out of lessons to rein in students on their phones.
“This has led to less time for instruction and also more frustration and exhaustion on my end,” said Whitley, who has taught at the high school for 27 years after attending the school himself.
Tameira Wilson, a social studies teacher at Aspen High School, said she rarely encounters students staring at phone screens during class. Last year, she hung a cellphone holder with pockets in her classroom.
Outside her classroom, however, she frequently sees kids in the hallway “glued onto their phones.”
She hopes that keeping cellphones out of sight will help students keep them out of mind, too, and will nudge them to return to conversations with one another rather than over text.
“One of the saddest things I think I see is groups of kids texting each other while they’re sitting at the same table (at lunch),” said Wilson, who is heading into her 21st year of teaching. “It’s kind of wild to see. So I think just the ability of students to connect as human beings is so important, and I think that will only impact their ability to work together when they’re problem-solving and moving through curriculum.”
Teachers see plenty of ways that students can use cellphones as a tool for learning — from assisting them with research, helping them track their to-do lists and helping them stay organized with a calendar. The problem, Whitley said, is that other apps do a better job of capturing students’ attention.
“I do believe that cellphones have the potential to be used as a learning tool,” he said. “I just think that the odds are stacked against this type of use. There are so many apps that work extremely hard to get the kids addicted to them and they seem to be succeeding, and most of those apps aren’t educationally focused.”
Meanwhile, school cellphone bans in Colorado districts have stirred a variety of emotions and reactions among parents — including those in Colorado Springs.
In a string of comments on the Doherty High School Facebook page, some parents sounded off on the new policy.
“Buying these ridiculous pouches is a waste of taxpayers’ money that ultimately will not work and end up causing more division,” one parent wrote. “Why don’t you spend the money on safety, training your teachers on taking better control of their classes and education instead of wasting money on these absolutely unnecessary pouches!”
Other parents expressed their support for the cellphone ban.
“Personally, my daughter has been saying it’s a good idea,” another parent wrote. “She keeps hers in a pouch I got her because I taught her that it’s better to have your phone actually put away. She only texts or checks in passing, lunch, or if she’s done her work and her teacher has given her permission. I’ve never had a teacher contact me to tell me otherwise and her grades have always been good, so I trust that. But she knows a lot of students always have them out, and this simply makes sense. So don’t think we’re not supportive or on board.”
Colby, the senior at Aspen High School, said that instead of imposing “sheer punishment” on students by restricting access to cellphones, she wants her teachers to show students how to use their phones with a sense of discipline and respect for those around them.
“I think that treating high schoolers as if we are just larger children is just not a productive way to send us off into the world,” Colby said. “And so I think if the school really wants to fix their cellphone issue, they should find some way to teach us better practices of cellphone use so that when we go off to college or we go off to trade school or whatever we do next, we’re not just sitting in the back on our phones not paying attention because we finally have the freedom to do so.”