Students at Farragut Career Academy in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood aren’t allowed to carry their cellphones in school.
At arrival, kids have to check their phones into a room where they remain locked for the school day. The idea is to keep students focused on their classes, engaged in real life social interactions and away from the distractions and, at times, drama that phones and social media can bring.
There have been mixed reactions.
Seniors Diego Servin and Esmeralda Orozco said they don’t even bother bringing their phones to school anymore. Orozco, 17, said she doesn’t think the ban is the solution to keeping students engaged.
“If someone doesn’t want to do their work, they’re going to find a way not to do it,” she said. “So I don’t think having your cellphone will make a difference.”
Illinois officials and researchers are betting otherwise.
Gov. JB Pritzker is looking to make all Illinois public and charter school classes phone-free in a proposal announced this week. There are bills in both chambers of the state Legislature targeting this issue in the spring session.
Pritzker’s plan would require school districts to come up with policies that ban phones during classroom instruction with some caveats. They’d be allowed in the case of emergencies or “imminent threats.” Teachers could continue to have their classes use them for lessons. And children with disabilities, health concerns or who are learning English could still use them when necessary.
The governor’s proposal would not ban phones in hallways, cafeterias or other non-instruction spaces or times.
A Pritzker spokesman last year told WBEZ there were no plans to consider a statewide policy limiting cellphone use.
But the governor’s office this week cited findings from the Pew Research Center that 72% of high school teachers identified cellphone distraction as a “major problem” in their classes, while another study found most adults support restrictions on phone use in classrooms but not for the entire school day.
There has been a bipartisan push to address the issue nationwide. Eight states have policies that ban or limit schoolhouse cellphone use, including California last year. Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky and Michigan are among the 15 states where bans or other restrictions have been proposed.
And some school districts in Illinois have no-phone policies, including in Champaign, Springfield and Peoria.
Peoria schools adopted a plan in which each student is issued a neoprene pouch with a magnetized lock that only teachers or administrators can open. Midway through the school year, a survey of 8,000 students from grades 5 to 12 found they had more focus, more engagement and reduced distractions, Superintendent Sharon Desmoulin-Kherat said.
She said that in an email, a teacher reported: “I am looking into students’ eyes who have never looked up from a screen before.”
Jocelyn Carter, a clinical psychology professor at DePaul University, said cellphones have become a crutch for children and adults alike to fill even small moments of downtime. Teenagers’ developing brains are especially susceptible to be drawn toward the constant stream of activity that can happen on a phone.
“When everyone is doing that, then they’re not connecting, they’re not looking around at what is actually going on in their environment,” Carter said. “And they’re getting that need for stimulation fed through their phone rather than through real-life interactions.
“It’s more comfortable than doing something like saying ‘hi’ or asking someone how their day was,” she said.
Diego Servin, a senior at Farragut Career Academy, doesn’t support restricting cellphone use in classrooms. “It bothers me a lot that we can’t have them.”
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Carter said research shows that less cellphone time could lead to improvements in peer relationships and social skills and more of a willingness to interact with classmates. There could also be fewer opportunities for cyberbullying. And spending time without phones could show kids that they, in fact, can survive without their device, which could lead to less reliance on phones outside of school hours, too, she said.
Parents and students have often raised concerns with phone bans restricting their communication during the school day and at pickup.
Servin, the Farragut student, said, “It bothers me a lot that we can’t have them.
“We live in a dangerous neighborhood — there’s a lot of gun violence here, and if something happens, how is my mom going to know?” he asked.
At Thomas Kelly College Prep in Brighton Park, freshman Alex Cervantes, 15, said he felt safer having access to his phone.
“A ban would probably be a big impact for us,” Cervantes said. “This is an OK neighborhood, but you never know what could happen. I’m just not used to not having my phone with me.”
Kelly has designated red, yellow and green zones for phone use.
“I think our school already does a pretty good job when it comes to cell phones,” said Kelly sophomore Andrea Placencia, 16. “Teachers collect phones when students are distracted, and they’re honest about our education and how our cell phones can affect us.”
Students also regularly use their cell phones for research during class or to submit assignments.
“I’m in an art class, and we need our phones to take photos and to turn assignments in,” said junior Acelyn Sanchez, 17.
Natasha Erskine, executive director of the parent group Raise Your Hand, said it’s clear research backs the benefits of phone-free learning, but she raised the same concerns with parent-student communication and with fair implementation.
“It usually lands a burden with those who have been historically criminalized, marginalized, pushed out of the classroom,” Erskine said. “That is the inequity that we have not seen enough attention put towards, so it persists.”
Pritzker’s proposal would prohibit enforcement of a cellphone policy using fines, fees, tickets or police.
Erskine said students and parents could also be concerned about how to contact each other in the event of an emergency, and some older students who are caregivers for their younger siblings may need access to their phones.
A couple years ago, Brentano Math and Science Academy restricted cellphones for the entire school day.
Principal Seth Lavin, who has raised concerns about cellphone usage since the pandemic and himself decided to revert to a flip phone, said kids were always distracted and their attention split, resulting in a “real loss in classroom culture and school culture, and it stands in the way of kids learning.
“Kids having phones changes their personalities,” Lavin said. “I’ve had teachers say, ‘I can tell when a kid gets a phone because they change.’”
Since the new policy, “Kids are present in a way that they weren’t before,” he said. “It’s like we have our children back … looking at the board, looking at each other, interested with their hand in the air … and building relationships with each other.”
He acknowledged that strict rules don’t always teach kids how to make their own decisions and set their own habits.
“But there are some things that are so dangerous and so powerful that kids need us as the grownups to make these decisions for them,” Lavin said. “And I really — as an educator — do that cautiously. I don’t think that should be our normal starting point. We should let kids make decisions, we should give kids freedoms.
“But phones are too powerful, they’re too dangerous, the stakes are too high, and the risk of them not being present in school because they have their phone is too great.”
Contributing: Associated Press
