HOLD THE PHONE: D51, WCCF team up to separate students from their phones

D51 Superintendent Brian Hill told The Daily Sentinel that he started receiving positive feedback on the policy from teachers from day one of the semester. He doesn’t believe it will take long for this to feel like the district’s “new normal.”

“Since the time that we started talking about this with our community and all the way through implementation now, I’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our families and even from our students and staff. This is an issue that cuts across all different groups throughout our community, and folks have realized this is an issue,” Hill said.

“We’ve received a ton of praise for just trying to tackle it. Even (Aug. 7), I got an email from a principal who wrote me, ‘Today was fantastic, seeing the kids at lunch and at recess talking and laughing together with no one sitting in isolation staring at a screen. Kids were interacting, socializing and having fun. Thanks for making this happen. It was only day one, but it’s already a very noticeable improvement.’ I’m hearing more of that than anything else.”

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

Hill said the district began forming this new policy more than one year ago when meeting with the Colorado Forum, as one of the topics was the mental health and well-being of students.

Hill then read some books to further educate himself on the impact of cell phones and social media on today’s youth. He first read “iGen”, a 2017 book by Jean Twenge. Then he and other D51 leaders, as well as the board of the Western Colorado Community Foundation (WCCF), read “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”, a book from this year by author Jonathan Haidt.

“The research has really been piling up over the last few years on the impact of social media and technology on adolescents,” Hill said. “We pulled a lot of inspiration and also a lot of data from those books, and it was really useful for us when we were going out and talking to students and staff and families and presenting to the board to be able to put up those charts and graphs and say, ‘Look, there’s actual data now that’s pointing to the negative impact of phones in schools. How can we tackle that as a district?’ That was a real catalyst for us.”

THE WCCF STEPS UP

After deciding the district needed to take a stronger policy stance on phones, Hill turned to the district’s behavioral specialist, Elizabeth Clark, who has an active relationship with the WCCF, to see how the foundation could help the district implement this policy — particularly through fundraising for the resources needed to actually separate students from their phones.

Clark had been instrumental for the past six years in connecting the foundation to the district as part of efforts to establish healthier habits and better counseling for students.

The result was the Hold The Phone initiative, launched in June with a goal of $100,000 to go toward purchasing equipment, such as phone pocket holders, multiple sizes of phone storage lockers and Yondr pouches that students can lock their phones in during classes.

Suggested donations included $250 for 20 pocket holders, $500 for 10 small storage lockers, $1,000 for 14 large storage lockers and $5,000 to provide Yondr pouches for six classrooms at Orchard Mesa Middle, West Middle, Fruita Middle and R-5 High schools.

As of the start of the semester, the WCCF was only $8,000 short of its goal. WCCF President Anne Wenzel is hopeful the goal will be easily reached soon as the initiative reaches its conclusion. She said more community members can donate even once the foundation reaches its goal, as the extra dollars can go toward needed equipment replacement.

“Dr. Hill led his Board of Education and principals and admins and teachers through this process. We think they took a very courageous stand to limit cell phones in the schools,” Wenzel said. “The transition will be what it will be, but we think it’s a wonderful thing to do. We were thinking, ‘We have donors who care a lot about youth mental health.’ I think we’re all aware of the dysfunctional and negative consequences of cell phones and screen time. It’s all sort of coming together at the national level with the surgeon general putting out a warning and social media legislation.”

The WCCF first approached Hill to discuss the possibility of providing Yondr pouches to all schools. Yondr pouches are individual pouches that students lock their phones into. Students can keep their phones physically close, but they can only unlock the pouch by applying heavy pressure to a magnet mounted on the wall.

However, after Hill polled district principals, he relayed to the WCCF that more options for storing students’ phones needed to be explored because of the price of the pouches. Other, less expensive options included boxes and mounted pocket holders.

“He polled everybody on who would want what and then we figured out what it would cost if we ordered all of those items, which came in around $98,000. We rounded up to $100,000,” Wenzel said. “It’s a blitz campaign this summer to raise the $100,000. It’s concrete. The cell phone storage items will be a visual reminder to everybody that we’re putting the phones away this year. They’re a practical way to practice that habit as all the principals and teachers try to make this the new policy norm.”

“When we started talking with Brian Hill before they had even brought the policy to the board, he voiced that some of these phone holders might be useful for the classroom as they move the policy forward,” added WCCF Program Officer Sarah Fuller. “We looked up what other school districts were using. The door hanger was a common one that came up.”

The WCCF’s challenge, Wenzel said, was mobilizing “little actions to have a ripple effect on leveraging things.”

Asked why she believes the new policy will be a success among many students who are often glued to their phones, Wenzel said that all students not having constant phone access will make it easier for them to accept this change.

“We’ve heard from students that they’re happy to not be on their phone, but they can’t not be if everybody else is,” she said. “There’s this concept of FOMO (fear of missing out), but if you have to put them away for the classroom time, nobody’s going to be on their phones, nobody’s going to be missing out, so it addresses that dynamic. Schools and districts that have done this have seen that students are paying more attention in class and they’re happier and engaging more.”

Wenzel said that the policy’s success now largely comes down to teachers throughout the district enforcing the policy. She praised them as “the real heroes” of the policy shift.

“When the rubber meets the road in terms of implementation, it’s falling to the classroom teacher. They’re the front line with the students with their phones. Different teachers have different patience levels and tolerance for monitoring, for taking phones away, for being the bad guys,” Wenzel said.

“We’re putting an awful lot of weight on our teachers to implement this policy, especially in the first several weeks. Kudos to the teachers who are mostly extremely enthusiastic. Kudos to them for trying to wade right into this huge societal issue and start to change behavior. If the holders and pouch devices can provide a little bit of support and a reminder of, ‘Hey, we’re all in this together,’ that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Hold the Phone was the first of several initiatives the WCCF has planned for this year to promote mindfulness and healthy use of phones and social media. The foundation will begin rolling out some of these initiatives this fall.