Commissioner of Education Jeff Riley said the state is not issuing a mandate on cell phone restrictions but may begin a grant program for districts investing in cell phone policies at a BESE meeting Tuesday. (Staff Photo By Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)
The phone may not be ringing soon in Bay State schools.
The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education began discussing options to silence cell phones to help kids learn.
“I thought it was important to begin the discussion of the use of cell phones and their effect on kids,” said DESE Commissioner Jeffrey Riley. “I’m not sure we as a board have ever taken up this issue in a way that needs to be addressed.”
Before several schools’ staff and students spoke on their cell phone policies Tuesday, Riley said the state would “likely” move to offer grants of up to $1 million to districts seeking to add cell phone restriction policies.
“Not a mandate at this time,” Riley said. “But we certainly are interested in piloting more of this.”
The policies may be practices to ban the use of phones on campus entirely — often using devices like lockable “Yondr Pouches” or more straightforward lockers — or restricting use in class but not in areas like hallways or lunchrooms.
BPS’s district-wide cell phone policy requires phones to be off and not visible during school hours on campus, under penalty of confiscation and disciplinary action for repeated offenses.
Several educators and students Tuesday spoke to how much the use of cell phones and social media has exploded in schools in recent years, especially since the pandemic.
“What happened in the year and a half during the time kids were on Zoom is they a lot of them ended up on phones and YouTube and on social media,” said Traci Walker Griffith, principal of the Eliot K-8 Innovation School in Roslindale, which uses pouches to deactivate phones during school. “This is not new to all of you. However, when we reopened in fall of 2021 … in a couple of months we realized cellphones were really now a huge problem.”
Griffith noted parents’ concerns about being able to contact their children and school safety are part of the school’s “ongoing process” with the policy, and teachers are still able to unlock pouches if students need to use their phones. Other speakers acknowledged exceptions for students in need of translation, with outside responsibilities or in other special circumstances.
Gwyneth Zeeck, an 8th-grade student at the Eliot School, said she noticed a “huge difference” in how present she and her classmates were with each other and in class after phones were removed.
Several student and educator speakers echoed the themes of connection to community, cultivating “habits of responsible use” of technology and focus on education in the classroom through these policies.
“We appreciate being here to think about the ways in which our Commonwealth is thinking about it,” said Griffith. “It’s not just a statewide problem; it is a world problem.”