‘We kind of got our students back’: Some Anchorage schools are rethinking smartphones

When the morning bell rings at Wendler Middle School, a flock of students settles into lunchroom tables for morning announcements. The school year is new — only the fourth day — and many of the sixth, seventh and eighth graders at this East Anchorage middle school are sporting fresh haircuts and as-yet scuff-free shoes.

Principal Marcus Wilson takes to the public address system, rattling off a list of the day’s happenings: Sports physicals are due. If your schedule needs a change, see the office.

And this one is important, Wilson says: Phones and other digital devices must be locked away all day.

A phone-free school day is part of what Wilson calls the “Wendler way of being.”

Starting at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, students at Wendler have been required to store their devices in their lockers for the duration of the school day. Those caught breaking the rules face an escalating series of consequences, including relinquishing the phone to a locked drawer in the office.

The idea is that students freed from their digital devices can better focus on both academic and social learning. Wilson wants the hours between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. to be a haven, a port in a digital world that demands near-constant attention for adolescents.

If not for the rule, a majority of students would be on their phones “continually,” Wilson said.

Going phone-free has profoundly changed the atmosphere of the school, said Wilson, a veteran principal who spent years at North Star Elementary School before moving to Wendler in 2019. Fights are down. Bullying is down. Students are more present in class. Some of the acute mental health issues that worried Wilson when he first took leadership of the school still exist, but removing the possibility of phone time in the school day seems to have relieved pressure and anxiety students feel about their nonstop social world unfolding on their screens.

“We kind of got our students back,” he said. “You start to see students talking more, face to face.”

Piper Jones, a longtime gym teacher, noticed kids walking down the hall in conversation with each other, rather than glued to their phones.

“They just became kids again,” she said.

Wendler is among a growing number of schools in Anchorage rethinking the role of smartphones amid a tidal wave of research that shows heavy use can have serious detrimental impacts on students’ learning and mental health. Romig Middle School, Polaris K-12, Anchorage STrEaM Academy and South Anchorage High School are among schools that have adopted “off and away all day” or limited phone policies, according to the district. Others are considering changes.

This year, a handful of Matanuska Susitna Borough schools are testing a pilot program that requires students to lock phones in school-issued pouches during the day.

Lumen Christi, a private coeducational Catholic school on the Anchorage Hillside, did away with phones back in the 2018-19 school year.

But it’s not simple: Over the past decade, smartphones have crept into every moment of adolescents’ lives. According to Common Sense Media, by age 10 some 42% of kids have a phone. By age 12, that percentage is up to 71%. By age 14, 91% of teenagers have one. The same study found that during school hours, 97% of study participants reported using their phones, for a median of 43 minutes.

Not everyone is for the change

Nationally, momentum is growing for a major rollback in the presence of phones in schools. Some of the nation’s biggest school districts, in New York and Los Angeles, in recent months have pushed policies to curtail phone use during school hours, and some states, including California, have passed legislation that would require districts to restrict student cellphone use.

The Anchorage School District’s current digital device policy was written in 2012 — and it shows, said Kelly Lessens, a parent and Anchorage School Board member who is working on a rewrite of the policy.

“It’s clunky,” she said. “It’s a decade out of date.”

The regulation delegates responsibility for managing digital devices to principals. Lessens said it’s too early to share what the rewrite might look like, but there’s clearly impetus for stricter rules related to digital devices — not just phones but earbuds, headphones, portable gaming systems and other devices.

“I think that there is certainly a lot of interest nationwide in ensuring that students are trying to focus on learning in schools and have time to engage in appropriate social interactions,” Lessens said.

Revising the policy is a priority and an ongoing conversation in the district, said Corey Allen Young, a spokesperson for the Anchorage School District.

Still, not everyone is for change. Banning phones is complicated, especially at the high school level where students drive and many schools have open campus policies, said Luke Almon, principal of South Anchorage High School.

At South, students must have phones away in a pouch during classroom instruction time, a change from past years. That’s about as far as it would be practical to go, Almon said.

“I would like to remove them during passing periods, but let’s be frank — I’m outnumbered,” he said. “It’s very difficult to police 1,300 kids when I have a maximum of 70 adults in the building, 50 of whom are trying to get ready for the next class period.”

Some parents and students have pushed back, saying kids need phones in case of a school emergency. And over the past decade, phones have slipped into the crevices of secondary school life — some classroom teachers ask kids to use them for calculators, or to turn in assignments. At South, practices of using phones for class activities have been discontinued, Almon said. That change is easier to pull off because all secondary students are issued a laptop, he said.

The recent momentum toward banning phones in schools is likely due to a few factors, said Sabine Polak, one of the founders of Phone-Free Schools Movement, a nonprofit that advocates for schools going completely phone-free during the school day. One factor is U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, who in May issued a first-of-its-kind advisory about the effects of social media use on the mental health of adolescents.

Wilson became the principal at Wendler Middle School in 2019, before the pandemic. Even then, student mental health was a dire concern, he said. That only increased after the pandemic’s remote learning era isolated students in their homes.

When kids came back, behavioral problems were pronounced and many students were completely dependent on phones, he said.

At South, Almon encountered what he called “Zoombie” — kids who had been relegated to online learning alone and sometimes unsupervised in their bedrooms for many months.

“You would pass a kid in the hallway who had been in that situation, say hello to them, and there was no effect, no response,” he said. “It was almost like they were still pretending they could mute you or turn off their camera on Zoom.”

At Wendler post-pandemic, drama unfolded in real time in the parallel digital universe, Wilson said. Online fights spilled into the real world, destructive TikTok trends, bullying — it all felt like it was reaching a fever pitch.

When Wilson decided to propose banning phones from the school day, families packed the library for a meeting. He made the case. Parents were relieved, he said.

“They were like, ‘thank you, thank you,’” Wilson said. “It really took the fight out of their hands, because parents are already having this battle (over phone use) with their kids.”

Wilson also wants to make the hours of the school day a break from unceasing pressures that adolescents face to participate in social media and nonstop communication with their friends and foes.

“I think it feels like a break for some of them,” he said. “It takes away some of that anxiety. Because phones are being whipped out, things are being recorded all the time, whether it’s hallway interactions or something else. So there’s not that pressure of, what if I do something and it ends up recorded and on social media?”

Now, starting the second school year under the policy, teachers say they notice a difference. But they aren’t under any misapprehension that removing phones will solve all the problems of middle school — or even that the phones are always truly locked away.

“They still do it,” said Jen Stoneburner, a student success coach. “We’re not delusional.”

‘There wasn’t a loss’

At South High, students must put away their cellphones for the class period in special pouches inside classrooms. They can still access phones during passing periods and at lunch. A more restrictive, all-day ban isn’t practical because of an open campus policy, which sees students leaving school grounds to take classes off-site, Almon said.

By every measure, the atmosphere at South High improved after phones became less present, Almon said. On the district’s climate and connectedness survey, which measures how students feel at school, the high school improved. The measurement of health of relationships between staff and students went up by 13 points, he said.

“On the student side, every single metric in the survey went in a positive direction,” he said. “There wasn’t a loss, even though it may have been somewhat controversial or distasteful for a kid to put their phone away.”

Even that adjustment required changes, like buying graphing calculators in scenarios where students in the past were asked to do certain calculations on their phone apps. Personal phones crept into curricular instruction, teachers and administrators say.

Some organizations, like the Phone-Free Schools Movement, advocate a complete school hours ban, and encourage schools to use technology such as locking Yondr pouches to physically separate students from their devices. An approach like the one at South Anchorage High School isn’t enough, they contend, because they are too easy to circumvent.

“It’s kind of a recipe for disaster, unfortunately,” Polak said.

In the future, the new standard will be that schools are phone-free, Polak believes. “When did we decide that our school day isn’t a sacred space, where we just allow kids to learn?” she said.

Wilson wonders if we won’t someday regard the proliferation of smartphones in schools as something akin to smoking on an airplane — an anachronism that in hindsight seems clearly unsafe.

What do students themselves think? Some profess to be relieved.

People are pretty attached to their phones, said Bella Gunter-Chavez, a junior at South. But the policy does seem to keep students focused in class without being too extreme, she said.

“It’s nice that people can still see their phones are not being taken away from them,” Gunter-Chavez said. “I mean, it’s just away from your body, in a little cubby.”

Removing phones in class shouldn’t be a big deal because some kids at Wendler already spend “three to four hours a day on their phone at home,” said Kellen Frost, an eighth grader.

Social media isn’t all bad, said Elaina Bartz, also in eighth grade. “It can be a good thing, and help people express themselves in ways they can’t at home or at school,” she said. “It can also be a bad thing.”

[Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the last name of South High School principal Luke Almon in two instances.]