Should phones be allowed in schools?
Put an end to school shootings and then students can put away their devices
In 2023, 80 Massachusetts schools were rewarded a state grant to implement cellphone ban programs. As of May, nearly 50 schools in the state have used those funds to implement a controversial system called Yondr, which locks phones and smartwatches away from student use during the school day. Students are issued a pouch with a magnetic locking system; when the students arrive at school, they wait in line for an administrator to lock their phones into the pouch and wait in line again at the end of the day for them to be unlocked. The program has already been implemented in schools in Holyoke, Salem, Springfield, Chicopee, and Newton.
The goal of the pouch system is to remove the temptation of using the phone from students so they can concentrate on school. That makes perfect sense (with the exception of neurodiverse kids and those struggling with mental health — both groups need that link to their parents). Classroom time should be dedicated to learning. And the onus for mobile device monitoring should not be on the teachers’ shoulders, which can be outright dangerous; earlier this year, a 15-year-old student in Atlanta attacked her teacher for trying to confiscate her phone.
In case of schoolwide emergencies, school administrators have protocols for communication, and students should be trained in the best use of their device during such an event to support those plans.
But it is not reasonable to assume school staff or administrators can always be the main point of parent contact because it is not possible to manage every eventuality in the bedlam of a traumatic event. Shooters sow chaos. Security protocols fail. Victims hide, they run, they are transported to safe locations or to hospitals by ambulances. There is not time to unlock pouches. There is not time to cut open pouches.
Time and again, cellphones have been the lifeline of students and their families in school shooting situations, evidenced by the 911 calls from the 2018 Parkland, Fla., shooting; the 10year-old who called police in the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, shooting; and a 911 call from a student at a 2018 shooting in Great Mills, Md.
Unfortunately, these events can no longer be reasonably assumed to always happen elsewhere. There were 188 K-12 school shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths in the United States in the 2021-22 school year, when some schools were still hybrid or remote due to COVID-19. That sounds insignificant compared to the number of schools, right? Surely there’s realistically nothing to worry about. But according to a Washington Post investigation, during that same time period there were over 1,150 guns seized, unfired, on school campuses; 1 in 47 US children attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported in the media during the 2022-23 school year. And those were just the seizures that were reported. There is no true tally of the number of guns that travel through the halls of US schools unseen, unfired, unknown.
The school gun epidemic isn’t going away, and it isn’t getting better. The numbers continue to rise: In the 2000-01 school year, on the heels of the Columbine shooting, there were 23 school shootings. In the 2012-13 school year, the Sandy Hook tragedy was one of 37 school shootings.
Parents now know that no one is coming to save us. This is not fixable. We were broken by Columbine, we were broken by Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde. We are broken by all those too small to make national news and broken by the fact that a school shooting too small for national news is normal. And it’s here at home: In March, 28 Massachusetts schools received mass shooting threats the day after six people died in a school shooting in Nashville.
The fear is omnipresent. As parents, we have limited tools to keep those fears at bay. One of those tools is simply faith in the teachers and administrators who have dedicated their lives to the education and well-being of the children in their care. But mostly we bought cellphones and smartwatches.
Educators, parents, guardians, and students need to work together to address unnecessary cellphone usage in classrooms. But severing this crucial lifeline between families and children is not the answer.
It is not reasonable to assume school staff or administrators can always be the main point of parent contact because it is not possible to manage every eventuality in the bedlam of a traumatic event.