NORTHAMPTON — Public schools here are moving closer to implementing a districtwide cellphone ban for students during the school day.
An ad hoc panel of school board members and stakeholders has been discussing revisions to a draft policy that would forbid public school students in Northampton from using phones in class, with a rollout planned for fall 2026.
At a recent meeting of the Northampton Public Schools’ cellphone policy committee, member Kate Parrott had good news from a science teacher at Hampshire Regional High School, which had recently adopted a “bell-to-bell” policy requiring students to stow their phones in magnetized Yondr pouches.
“Kids are interacting with each other way more,” the teacher told her.
The ad hoc panel was formed after a bill banning the use of smartphones in public classrooms in Massachusetts passed the state Senate in July on a 38-2 vote before stalling out in the House of Representatives, Superintendent Portia Bonner said in an email to The Republican.
That left school districts to hash out policies on their own. The bill would mandate a “bell-to-bell” ban on cellphones while allowing districts to adjust rules to fit their needs, according to a statement.
Northampton plans to ban cellphone use for the entirety of the school day — including lunchtime and recess — only making exceptions for off-campus visits and documented medical needs. In its current form, the policy requires middle and high school students to store devices in locked Yondr pouches they can keep, according to details shared during the Dec. 4 meeting.
Elementary students will follow an “off-and-away” policy, requiring them to power off devices and keep them in their backpacks.
A wrinkle in the plan, however: State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-1st Hampshire, told Parrott the bill would come with no state financial backing. Northampton is requesting $53,473 from the district’s capital planning budget to cover the cost of Yondr pouches for middle and high schoolers, the superintendent said. The district also is discussing how to fill staffing needs that might arise from having to lock and unlock Yondr pouches as students come and go.
All grade levels will face consequences for using a smartphone “anywhere on school grounds,” “damaging or taking someone else’s pouch,” or tampering with pouches to get at a device, according to a draft of the policy shared with The Republican.
In a Nov. 6 meeting, School Committee member Ann Hennessey shared that Chicopee High School’s roughly 900 students enter through a single entrance, where 10 staff members operate 12 “magnetizers,” which seal phones in Yondr pouches on arrival. Some “unintended consequences” included “more talking in the cafeteria, more focused students, and fewer air drops (sharing videos of fights),” she reported.
At the December meeting, Bonner said students with documented medical needs would qualify for exemptions, using pencil pouches for easy access or checking their phones at scheduled times throughout the school day. Only a dozen or so students across the district would need accommodations, the majority of them for glucose monitoring, hearing aid adjustments and neurological issues, she said.
Talk of implementing a ban began in earnest after Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell issued a recommendation for districts to adopt bell-to-bell policies, Bonner wrote. Already, at least 80 Massachusetts school districts have implemented restrictions of some kind.
Reached for comment last week, Holly Ghazey, a member of the phone policy committee and the Northampton School Committee, said times have changed since she retired from teaching in 2014.
Through a confluence of factors — the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, easy access to technology — students have become more attached to their phones, and parents contact their children more through the devices.
“I never had to worry about sending my kids to school … maybe they fall off the jungle gym and break a bone and nothing else,” Ghazey said.
But she noted that first responders often say a student with a smartphone is a liability, not a help, in an emergency situation. And Northampton is in the process of installing a landline in each classroom that connects to the office and 9-1-1, she said.
A July survey conducted by the Pew Research Center highlighted growing support for bell-to-bell policies: between last fall and this summer, the share of U.S. adults who favor banning cellphones in middle and high school jumped 6%, from 68% to 74%. That support reflects what Gwen Agna, co-chair of the School Committee, has heard from parents.
“The general feeling is that they’re relieved, that they would have some ways to mitigate, at least during school, online activities,” she said.
The cellphone policy committee is planning to reconvene twice more before submitting its final recommendation to the School Committee in February, Bonner said, after which point the committee will take a final vote.
In the meantime, Ghazey said, the phone policy committee will figure out how to get feedback from parents, as well as how to collect baseline data — on everything from disciplinary actions to bullying reports — to compare against future data that will be collected once the policy is in place.
Consequences for violating the phone policy might include participating in a “learning module” on phone harms, similar to what happens at John F. Kennedy Middle School, according to educators who attended the December zoom meeting.
One book being considered for inclusion is “The Amazing Generation,” a kid-friendly guide to tech independence inspired by co-author Jonathan Haidt’s landmark book, “The Anxious Generation,” which implicates tech companies’ reliance on addicting features to generate revenue, which is in lockstep with rising rates of teen depression and anxiety.
Academic performance might follow a similar track. Beginning in 2012, PISA, an international benchmarking test, logged a sharp decline in 15-year-old students’ science, math and reading scores, the Financial Times reported in March.
“Paying attention is hard in school,” Ghazey said. “And I believe phones feed that short stimulation loop. I mean, you open Instagram and within three seconds you got a funny story, a this, a rant, whatever.”
The Financial Times also analyzed the Monitoring the Future Survey, which asks American 18-year-olds if they are having trouble concentrating.
“The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid 2010s,” the analysis found.
