Educator Jon Larmee writes about school phone bans in Jefferson County, which are set to expand in the coming 2025-26 school year.
There’s a lot of ways to serve up the anti-smartphone spiel. A YouTube search alone about escaping the algorithm’s clutch returns an unfathomable well of videos. Your Facebook account (which the kids tell me are for old farts and their considerate grandkids) probably features a half dozen jokes drying out under the heat lamps. And you likely remember the former Surgeon General’s warning about the dangers of social media use.
But those approaches with their ornate frames and colorful clickbait headlines, they’re all so ominous. Fearmongering. Utopic preaching. So I’m going to tell you my experience instead, in its comedy and messiness.
I became a classroom teacher in August of 2021, entering the job in the first full year back from distance learning (my apologies for the jumpscare). I’d spent the previous Spring semester as a substitute in an elementary school where I often heard how different the kids were. But I didn’t fully grasp how the decade I’d been away from school had changed kids until I sat in a room with 25 teenagers plugging away on worksheets… silently.
Some of my colleagues were complimentary of the quiet. “Mr. Larmee,” a senior teacher told me in front of one class, “do you ever tell your students you appreciate how calm they are?” A few students took notice, but most continued oscillating between their phones and worksheets.
Truthfully, it was a hard reality for me as a new teacher. I had envisioned a classroom community worth missing during absences and breaks (see Asimov’s “The Fun They Had”). But by year’s end, most of my students couldn’t tell me the names of five classmates. And I wasn’t alone in noticing this issue. Many of the conversations I had getting to know my new colleagues revolved around students’ phone use and resistance to working collaboratively. It was like they all feared they’d end up as fodder for eternal, online embarrassment.
For the next two years, our responses to the issue varied. One teacher used a laser pointer to alert students that he noticed they were distracted without interrupting the rhythm of his lecture. Another added a bullet point to the end of each of his slides that said, “Put away your phone.” I was personally fond of distributing brown lunch bags during labs that would be stapled shut.
There were teachers who maintained their pre-pandemic expectations and wrote referrals as needed, where consequences progressed from a call home to time in In-School Suspension. This had been the official policy of JCPS, according to the Student Support and Behavior Intervention Handbook, for some time. The evidence can be found in how antiquated some of its examples of personal telecommunication devices are. Some high schoolers may have come across their parents’ MP3 players; they might have seen walkie-talkies in cop dramas, but I’ve only heard one student speak familiarly about a pager (when his parents swapped his phone for one as a punishment).
Students were vocal about how much they disliked the policy being upheld. In response, I’d tell them that back in my day, after MP3 players but before the ubiquity of smartphones, school staff readily confiscated phones. And it wasn’t until the end of class or the school day; it was until a parent came to get it.
It’s easy to understand the shift in enforcement when smartphones became ubiquitous and the value of user data subsidized the cost of phone plans. Eighty-dollar Nokias, or even a two-hundred-dollar Motorola Razr, is a different level of liability than a thousand-dollar iPhone that serves the purpose of a second brain.
That’s not hyperbole either. Ask a teen in your life about the most important people in their life and then ask them each one’s phone number and address. Or how many places they could give detailed directions to. Bonus: offer to buy them whatever food’s trending on TikTok if they can beat you in a typing test.
All this is to say that the authors of the simple, zero-tolerance phone policy didn’t anticipate just how central phones would come to be to students’ lives. It’s a blue-light heliocentrism that I didn’t fully appreciate until the Spring of 2024 when a conversation about missing work snowballed into a sidebar lecture about daily phone use.
In the middle of discussing her grade (read: heaps of missing work), a freshman giggled at a text message. I stopped mid-sentence to glare. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she responded, “I went to respond to a text from my mom and this video was still up.” She turned her phone to show me the video, but I reminded her why we were talking in the first place. She pulled back on the window and began swiping away several apps worth of screens.
“How much time do you usually spend on your phone in a day,” I asked her.
“I don’t know. A lot. How do you check?” After flipping through a few screens, we found out she spent an astonishing 15 hours a day looking at her phone on average. That particular day, she was already past the 14-hour mark from staying up late and leaving Netflix on to fall asleep. She met the news with a giggle and went to show her friends. Then she walked them through the screens we had just navigated to find their own averages.
Their surprise at the numbers gave way to a Very Gen Z discussion of the apps that took up their time. As their conversation lulled, one of the girls made a profound comment that caught me by surprise. “I know we just said we can’t believe how much we’re all on our phone…but I keep like…picking up my phone.” It was a reflex. And now they were conscious of it.
The next day, I began all my classes by asking students to take out their phones and check their own average daily use. The freshman from the day before turned out to be on the high end of phone use, but few were below five hours per day. Almost none were unaffected by the number.
We had some great discussions that day. But one topic came up each period, without fail: what’s the point of getting off their phones if all students have to do in class is boring worksheets? Looking past whether or not education is meant to be entertaining, I told my students that their disengagement and phone use was as much a cause of boring curricula as it was a symptom; a real chicken-and-egg conundrum for the digital age.
Speaking of chicken and eggs, I’ll use an example from my culinary curriculum. If I intend to have a chicken nugget lab, my students need to be versed in a few things: handwashing, food safety, proper knife skills, and the process for deep frying. Because all of these present some potential hazard, there has to be thorough preparation by way of lectures, demonstrations, notes, and knowledge checks. That’s a lot of layers to get through without incident if I prefer labs not include cut finger tips and countertops contaminated with chicken juice. Every time I’d look out to a room of distracted students, I’d be reminded how much easier worksheets make things.
Shortly after, but in no way inspired by my conversations, a committee of teachers and administrators at my school formed to discuss a more robust phone policy. They were fed up with the effect of phones on class and the inconsistency of how they were handled from room to room. By the last week of school, they had drafted a policy and distributed a presentation for classroom teachers to share with students. Giving students a heads up was the right approach, but man, did it ruin the end-of-the-year vibes.
Being one of the more lax teachers when it came to phones, I fielded a lot of questions and complaints about the policy from students who thought they’d find a concurring opinion. But I told each complainant, and sometimes whole classes, when the conversation persisted, that they’d missed the point of my being lax.
“Your phone use is a you problem. And by the end of the semester, sometimes it’s a U problem.” Yes, I dropped a dad joke on them. “I handle it that way because in a few years, when you’re in college or at work, there’s less patience and quicker consequences.”
I’d spent three years telling myself this was a lesson they have to learn even when, semester after semester and year after year, it was clear they hadn’t. I knew I wasn’t alone in taking this tact: not in my building, not in the district. But it was time to admit it wasn’t working and prepare to fall in line.
That summer, I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. One of the phone policy committee members was gracious enough to loan me a copy. What stood out the most, past the data about declining mental health and generational changes in attitudes about child-rearing that substantiated several of my beliefs, was the concept of collective-action traps. If, in a moment of exhaustion, you close all your feeds and decide to interact with the world around you, you’re greeted by a bunch of people still locked into their own screens. Basically, everyone’s on their phone because everyone’s on their phone. That means kids and adults.
In the opening days of Fall 2024, when teachers attend meetings for updated policies and procedures while thinking about the disarray in their classrooms, we were polled about their own phone use. We were asked to check our average screen time and then stand. As the presenter counted down, teachers would sit when their average screen time had been undercut. By the four-hour mark, plenty had already sat down. By the two-hour mark, three were left standing. A few peers called out in disbelief.
After the remainder were dashed by the one-hour mark, one turned to me and said, “They’re only asking about time on phone screens.” This computer nerd (he knows what he is) raised another question: how many of us were enamored by other devices in our spare time?
Unsurprisingly, the opening week of the 2024-25 school year presented lots of resistance to the policy. Kids brought forth realistic concerns about communication with coaches and parents, which the policy made room for: designated lunch tables to check phones briefly and safe spaces in the office to contact home. Still, the resounding response was appreciation for the new school environment. The news even took notice.
Come February, while on a trip to Frankfort to advocate for Career and Technical Education, one Jefferson County Representative mentioned that there was a bill in committee that would require school districts to ban phones. (Technically, the bill refers to all “personal telecommunications device[s],” which includes cellular telephones and paging devices.) He’d hear plenty about it from his own teenage children, but he wanted to know what my colleagues and I had actually experienced.
Four years earlier, I would’ve told him that phones were annoying, but students still needed to realize it was on them to get better. At that moment, though, after years of watching students reflexively reach for their phones while working with food and hearing them express how distressing social media’s gravitational pull could be, I told him it had clearly been the right call.
KRS 208 was passed with bipartisan support and signed by Governor Beshear in March. Adding Kentucky to a growing list of states that have codified phone bans. Outgoing Superintendent Marty Pollio planned to submit a districtwide policy for the 2025-26 school year, helping JCPS address the district wide collective-action trap.
This is happening. And, without a doubt in my mind, it’s for the best.
That doesn’t necessarily mean students agree, of course. They went to fantastic lengths to unlock or circumvent the Yondr pouches (which our school used but are not required by KRS 208).
Students told me that peers would buy magnets off Amazon and charge classmates to unlock their phones. This came despite our warnings about electronics and magnets.
Several students thought they were clever by placing empty cases, a stack of LEGOs, or even dummy phones in pouches. They realized how unconvincing this was when the pouch was unlocked and the colors didn’t match what a teacher saw. To one freshman’s credit, I saw him laugh, say “yeah, okay,” and pass his phone off.
I don’t have the hard data to cite about the decrease in fights or (non-phone) disciplinary actions, though they were discussed a few times. Instead, I want to share one last anecdote that I think ties all the good about being off phones together.
A group of boys were plugging away on a project when the subject of one’s new girlfriend came up.
“Yeah, we were talking on the phone last night, and she was telling me her favorite color. I’d never heard of it before. It’s like…pinker-winkle.” The group erupted with laughter.
“What’s pinker-winkle?” Periwinkle, I corrected through my own laugh.
Is periwinkle a vital concept to succeeding in life? No. Is it even relevant to my curriculum? Certainly not. But that exchange was so serendipitous. Social media algorithms direct our attention by linking our interests to adjacent ones. And those boys had no interest in whimsical colors; where else would they learn about periwinkle if not by chance?
What other things, of what greater importance, could they learn from one another if they were present more often? That presence, that ability to foster community in their immediate and physical surroundings: that’s what so many of them have been missing out on.
And that’s what a phone ban returns to them.
