Daily Sentinel Editorial  |  August 28, 2024

The implementation of Mesa County Valley School District 51’s new cell phone policy is off to a good start with acclaim from teachers, broad community support and hopes that a “new normal” is just around the corner.

Yes, it’s early. The school board passed a policy update over the summer, but schools could only start assessing how it works when students returned to the classroom earlier this month.

The new cell phone policy prohibits high school students from having their phones during class periods and prohibits elementary and middle school students from having their phones throughout the school day.

So far, so good. In fact, it’s the kind of difference-maker that has everyone wondering why D51 didn’t try it sooner. Superintendent Brian Hill shared an email from one principal who called the first day of school “fantastic” with students at lunch and recess “interacting, socializing and having fun” and “no one sitting in isolation staring at a screen.”

Credit D51 officials with taking the time to familiarize themselves with the barriers that handheld devices place between students and learning.

Hill 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, who has compared social media to waterboarding.

While the new policy is certain to minimize phone-related disruptions in the classroom — and, hopefully, incidents of cyberbullying — it’s important to realize it’s merely a step in the right direction. It’s fair to assume that kids, having been denied their accustomed screen time, will simply binge social media content off campus.

That should be a concern for parents. Studies continue to affirm a link between social media consumption and rises in anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide among teens — especially girls.

Focusing on suicides and self-harm among 17 countries, The Economist last year found that suicide rates among girls aged 10-19 rose from an average of 3.0 per 100,000 people in 2003 (at the dawn of smart phone technology) to 3.5 per 100,000 in 2020; while the rate among boys barely changed.

“For teenage girls, rates of hospitalization for self-harm have climbed since 2010 in all 11 countries with available data, by an average of 143%. Boys’ average rise was 49%,” the journal reported, though it was careful not to draw a cause-and-effect relationship.

Haidt is less circumspect; phone-enabled social media is hostile to human development, he says. The antidote isn’t just phone-free schools. He recommends more “unsupervised play and childhood independence,” “no smartphones before high school” and “no social media before 16.”

District 51 has gotten the ball rolling on understanding the impact that phones can have on children’s development. Parents should consider what they can do to mitigate the worst impacts of smart phones on their children’s lives.