More than 70% of high school teachers in the U.S. say cell phones are a major classroom distraction, according to The Pew Research Center. Across the nation, schools are adopting new bans on phones as they continue to cause issues in student learning.
A number of Oregon schools have been adopting new practices to minimize the use of phones in class, ranging from cell phone pouches to new district-wide policies. Before the school year began, Gov. Tina Kotek said this summer she’d like to see a statewide approach to the issue. Nick Lupo is the principal for Taft 7 -12 Middle and High School in the Lincoln County School District. His school has been using Yondr pouches since last year. Gabe Pagano is a principal at Cascade Middle School in the Bend-La Pine School District, where a new “silent and away” policy has been put in place across the district. They join us to share more on these policies and how phone use has changed over the years in Oregon schools.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. More than 70% of high school teachers across the U.S. say cellphones are a major classroom distraction – that is according to the Pew Research Center. Schools across the country are adopting new bans on phones and other devices in response. There is no statewide policy in Oregon, not yet, at least. But districts have been tightening their rules.
Nick Lupo is the principal at Taft 7-12 Middle and High School in the Lincoln County School District. His school has been having students put phones in pouches since last year. Gabe Pagano is a principal at Cascade Middle School in the Bend-La Pine School District where a “silent and away policy” is now in place throughout the district. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Nick Lupo: Hello.
Gabe Pagano: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Gabe Pagano, first. How long have you worked in schools?
Pagano: I am almost coming up to my 20th year in education. I started as a language arts teacher and I worked my way up through the system.
Miller: So in 2004 or so, when you started, did any kids have cellphones?
Pagano: Gosh, I remember like one or two kids maybe having a cellphone. And that was typically when I was in high school, it was like a senior, maybe a junior. And then it’s just been a slow uptick since. After COVID, it seems like that spiked considerably and we started seeing cellphones really drift into the middle school realm where I found myself.
Miller: So that was a kind of inflection point then, post-lockdowns at the return to school, you saw an increase in cellphones among even younger students?
Pagano: Yeah, I know even just as a parent, the conversation was coming, like keeping kids connected and how are kids being connected when we were in quarantine? And I just think part of where we found ourselves was a result of putting cellphones in kids’ hands to communicate with others, communicate with families and then obviously it trickled into the schools more than what we’d seen normally but before that.
Miller: Nick Lupo, can you describe what cellphone use was like before the ban was implemented in your school? So three years ago or so, what would you see in the lunchroom, in hallways or in classrooms?
Lupo: Yeah, we saw the same thing. We saw a good influx after COVID. I go to lunch rooms. I have a middle school and a high school so we do them separately. At middle school, we’d see a lot of our boys on games, gaming, trying to eat lunch and we’d see a lot of our girls on social media, looking at image stuff, trying to get likes, those kinds of things. So our lunch room was actually very quiet. On the high school side, I’d walk into classes, we’d have kids on their devices, kids watching, streaming movies, doing those kinds of things. And then the second they exited the class, we’d see them go right to their right to their device when they’re going to the next class. So it was like they didn’t even look up sometimes going down the hallway because their devices were always there.
Miller: What would go through your mind in the middle school lunchroom, in particular, when it was quiet? Not because kids were, I don’t know, eating and being too polite, but just because they were engaged in their own small digital worlds?
Lupo: We saw a lot more once we took the phones away because kids were talking and I had students and even my own children go, oh, my friends and I, we were talking at lunch because we couldn’t use our phones. So I think just seeing the transition was a good way to see that kids actually wanted to talk to each other and kind of got out of their shell a little bit, but it was sometimes disheartening. You’d walk over to a table of either girls or boys and they would not even interact with one another, and that was just their time to stare at their device or stare at their thing. So a lot better things have come out of it. A lot better movement, conversations and things have come out of it since the phone ban.
Miller: But you said that sometimes you’d look in classes and students were watching movies on their phones in the middle of a class.
Lupo: Because we’re one to one, I’d have kids that they prop their phone up on their computer. So when you looked at it from a teacher’s point of view, you wouldn’t see that their phone was on their computer a lot of times. So I would enter the class and sometimes from behind and see kids just typing or doing something on their phone looking like they were on their computer. It was just that deception thing that they would have going on with the phones and a lot of was with social media, a lot of social media things and a lot of gaming stuff.
Miller: Gabe Pagano, in the Bend-La Pine School District, what did you actually see at its worst? Before the new policy was implemented, what was an average day like in terms of cellphone use?
Pagano: Well, when we’re working with middle school students, they are learning skills on how to communicate, how to grow and broaden their executive functions. And when we weren’t even getting to that … The ultimate goal when a kid sits in a classroom is to learn and if there’s so many distractions and there’s so many different things that are pulling their attention away from a very skilled teacher, we just knew that something had to change. It just wasn’t sustainable. I mean, we’re paid by the public to educate their kids, and if we’re not doing that and there’s some disruption, we knew we had to make some type of change to at least help teach kids skills or be present in the information that’s being presented by their teachers.
What I also heard was from some pretty frustrated teachers about, I’m spending all this time and I really think my engagement in my class may be less than 50%. And for us as the building administrators, that’s just not right. We’re not doing our jobs if we’re allowing that to happen. We’re wasting taxpayers money if we have less than 50% engagement. They’re still middle school kids. They’re still going to do things and act their middle school way, and we have to teach them the skills to be successful as they grow up and get ready for high school. But, if there’s that big of a distraction, something had to be done.
Miller: What were the policies that you tried before you arrived at the current thing, which I’ve seen described as “off and away all day.” I mean, what was before that?
Pagano: So our policy that we tried coming out of COVID was we tried to tell kids we didn’t want to see their cell phones. And so if it was in their pocket or if it was in their backpack, we were fine with that. Like Nick said, we didn’t want it out in the class. We didn’t want it to be a distraction. But we all know that if we have a cellphone in a pocket or we have a cellphone in a backpack and we feel that buzz, even though it’s not out and visible on the table, we know that the brain of the student in middle school is going to, oh, I wonder who’s buzzing me? I wonder who’s checking my snap. Is my streak alive? What’s on Instagram? That again then is just taking for us the brain of the child and distracting it to their pocket or their backpack.
So what we did is we went then the following year and said, you know what? We are asking all students to put their cell phones in their lockers from the start of the day until the end of the day and remain there for the remainder of the day. We wanted to take the distraction completely away, like literally separating them from the distraction. And so we basically, that’s our policy. We just call it “silent and away during the day” and that’s from 8:50 in the morning till 3:45.
Miller: What did you hear from your students when you made that switch?
Pagano: Oh, they didn’t like it. [Laughter] I mean, obviously, but I think it was a turning point for us when I was presenting at an open house and we probably had 600 families in the gym. And we said, you know what, we kind of took a really firm stance. We said this is our cellphone policy and we’re going to stand by it because we just can’t have these distractions. And the gym erupted with cheers and we’re like, OK, this was easy. This was a lot easier than we thought.
Miller: The cheers were from parents?
Pagano: From parents. And for us, that told us the parents in the school were on the same expectations for cell phones and then the kids just had to deal with it, and the adults were making the right decision. And for us, it’s been cake ever since. It’s been so easy.
Miller: Have you ever announced a policy change for your school that led parents to erupt in cheers?
Pagano: No, absolutely not.
Miller: So Nick, can you tell us about the rule that you have there in your school, which is unlike what Gabe was talking about in a middle school? Yours is grades 7 through 12, so a bigger age range there. What is the rule?
Lupo: Same as Gabe, there is a policy in place. So we just said, hey, we want to invoke this policy that’s already in place. We kind of went with out of sight, out of mind. We don’t want it in schools. We don’t want it … again, 8 [am] to 4 [pm] is what we try to do as well. We ended up partnering with Yondr to actually supply a pouch that kids could put that in. And so when they walk into the school, they have the option to put that thing in the pouch, lock it and put that thing away. We also ask them to leave in their car if they are drivers to school.
So that has kind of how we had that tool in place, and also letting teachers know that we did not want it on campus, let the parents know, the students know that that was going to be the new rule that it’s out of sight out of mind. We don’t even want it buzzing, kind of like Gabe said, we don’t want it on because it does trigger your brain to be like, oh I gotta check my phone, I gotta check my messages, I gotta check this. And so that’s the stance we took.
We had a really good experience with our teachers once we started that and just the difference they saw in the kids, because they didn’t have to deal with the cell phones and talking to them about putting it away, or having a buzz in their pockets, or even trying to go, “I gotta order lunch” or any of those things the high schoolers got to jump on their phone to do – it’s always an emergency when it comes to some of our high schoolers or middle schoolers. “I gotta check my thing, my parents could text me.”
So we put it out of sight of the mind. We published how they can get a hold of their kid, let them know they can call the school. And then they can also make transportation arrangements with the school. And then because we do off-campus lunch, our upperclassmen are allowed to use their phones when they exit campus at lunch. And so that’s their break. They get to go off campus, they can use your phone then, but when they come back on campus, we say that it’s still not allowed on school.
Miller: Just for folks who haven’t seen or held one of these Yondr patches – and I’m in that, I’ve never touched them, I’ve just seen pictures and read about them – can you describe how they work?
Lupo: Yeah, it’s basically like if you go to a store and you have a magnet on one of your clothing pieces. That strong magnet is the magnet that will close the Yondr pouch. So in order to unlock it, you would have to go to one of our stations and unlock it through that.
Miller: The way that anti-theft tag would then be unlocked behind the counter at a clothing store?
Lupo: Yeah. Very, very, very similar. So that’s kind of how it is. And so kids are like, I don’t want this bag, I don’t want to use it. And we keep telling them, we just don’t want it ever out. So this is the thing, I’m not gonna collect the phone, I’m not gonna take it. I don’t wanna touch it. It’s your property, but you cannot have it out. So this is the tool we’re gonna give you to make sure that it’s out of sight, out of mind. You can focus on your academics, you can focus on your classes. So that’s what we talk to them about.
When they do have it, we just make sure, “hey, you gotta pouch up, you gotta put that thing away” and then we’ll send them back to class if we need to. But that’s the stance we usually take: “Hey, we, we found you with the phone. We’re gonna call your parents, we’re gonna let them know the policy again.” So they have to pouch up, they have to put it there. But we try our best because we’ve gotten a circumstance before where kids get pretty amped up if we are holding their property and holding their stuff. So we just let them know, “we’re not gonna touch your stuff, but it’s not supposed to be on campus and if you’re gonna be on campus with it, you’re gonna use that Yondr pouch.”
Miller: How much did it cost to buy these pouches for 700 or so kids?
Lupo: They’re not cheap. We had a little bit of building carry over and extra funds to kind of pilot that. When we look at it, it’s upwards of 15 bucks a kid or more to get those pouches, but now we own them. That’s kind of where I’m at right now – we’re working on processes where our kids come to school, they don’t have a phone. Our kids come to school and they’re kept in their car so they don’t need that pouch. So the kids that do need the pouch or we have to enforce the pouch on them, because they need a little bit more monitoring, then we’ll give the pouch to them and make sure they’re monitoring that but through the pouch.
Miller: Kids and teens can be pretty rebellious, pretty wily. Have they found ways to get around or try to get around the system?
Lupo: Yeah. We kind of tease because if a kid got his pouch open, it’s still a phone-free school. That’s what we say: it’s a phone-free school. So even if you got your pouch open, it wouldn’t make a difference because if you get caught with your phone, the same circumstances apply whether you had that or not. So we deal with that. We always call this like a tier one approach. Most of this stuff is gonna happen with our kids and they’re gonna comply, and then we have a few select kids who don’t do that or they sneak it.
We just work with those kids that maybe need that extra reteach or that extra layer of support to let them know “here’s the rules, here’s what we’re gonna do.” And we work with their parents. But we find kids all the time that won’t do that. It’s not many every day, but we have kids … most of the time, it’s not in class or it’s during the passing period that they wanna try to get on their phone. So we just work with them.
Miller: Gabe Pagano, your district, Bend-La Pine, has a policy that is more strict for middle schoolers, for kids in schools like yours who can’t have phones at all during the day. But in high school, they are allowed during breaks like passing periods or at lunch. What’s the thinking behind that?
Pagano: I think we’re talking really about just skill-building with kids. And I think even as adults, we’re building skills around probably our own cell phone and technology usage. I don’t want to speak for the high schools, but I think it’s like, if you can manage the classroom and the learning time from bell-to-bell. And then you have that piece, as Nick talked [about], like your time when you leave at lunch. I think it’s kind of trying to meet kids where they’re at. I think when we talk about policy, we talk about it like we really see things as black and white, and I don’t think that our cell phone policy in middle school is really black and white. I think what we’ve done is we’ve just set some really high standards and expectations, and then we’ve also just taken the time to tell the kids the “why” behind why we want this. We really value the education that we want to try to give them.
So what I think when we have that, we get a better response, rather than this “here we go, we’re walking down the hall, we’re looking for your cellphones, we’re looking to enforce this policy.” The policy here – maybe the kids will say differently – it doesn’t feel like a real authoritative approach to “here we come looking for your cell phones.” It’s more of an education piece. As they come into sixth graders, then seventh graders and eighth graders, hopefully they build some skills around technology and technology use. And I think by the time they get to high school, they’re trying to acknowledge those skills. Some kids need to work a little bit more on those.
I think that’s the flexibility and the little change that we see in Bend-La Pine and what the high schools are working with. But I think the most important piece – no matter what people do or where schools or teachers land – is that you just need to address the behavior and try to teach the “why” behind the behavior change. And if we do that, then we’re always moving in the right direction when it comes to distracted learning.
Miller: We talked about this issue last month with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. I want to play you both an exchange from that interview.
Governor Tina Kotek [recording]: There is really strong bipartisan interest – House, Senate, Republican, Democrat – on this issue. So I feel like they are poised to lead. And what I will say is my experience has shown it’s better to have a statewide policy, because if a child moves from district to district, don’t you think they should have the best policy no matter where they go to school based on what the evidence says? And what the evidence is saying is having personal devices in a classroom on a regular basis, distracts from learning, increases incidents of bullying and emotional dysregulation. Why wouldn’t every district want to do that? So, I hope legislators go with a statewide policy that every district asked them to.
Miller [recording]: Would you support a funded mandate that says, if you’re a kid in Oregon school, you can’t have your phone with you, we will buy each of your district’s pouches … and kids walk in, they put the phone in the pouch, [and] when they leave, they take the phone and go home, and they can be online as much as they want. Would you support that?
Kotek [recording]: I think I’m definitely open to that.
Miller: Gentlemen, I’m curious what both of you think about that? Would you support a statewide policy like that? Gabe Pagano, first.
Pagano: I mean, absolutely. I think the benefits we’ve seen are too great. Yeah, kids talking to one another during lunchtime, kids working out their own differences, kids having conflict with one another and not the interface being between a device through social media, working on skills, building skills. I couldn’t agree more with what she said when it comes to cell phones and the access the kids have during their education. I think Nick and I would speak for our teachers and probably our communities that like this is the best thing we can do for our kids to take away the device, take away the distraction, do everything we can so they can be ready to learn. That’s why parents are sending them to school to learn. That’s what our job is and that’s why we’re in the roles we are, to help teachers and kids access their education.
Miller: And Nick, in a sense, you’ve already spent $10,000 or so of money on this. I suppose if the state were going to pay for that instead, it’s hard to imagine you complaining about that.
Lupo: No, I wouldn’t complain about it. And, again, I think Gabe has two great points that we have here at Taft as well. Supporting our teachers – I mean, we want to really do that and it’s not like we go around and be like, “do you have your phone on you” or “are you doing this?” It’s not a gotcha moment. It is really just teaching the kids that you’re here, “we’re here to teach you, we’re here to make sure you’re learning.” So I think that is the education piece around. It is really the huge, huge section of this that we try to get to as well. Because we want kids to recognize that when they come here, you have access to a one-on-one computer, you have access to teachers and you wanna make sure that you’re learning here.
So I support it. It was an experiment a year-and-a-half ago. And I get really good support from a lot of people. A lot of kids didn’t like it. Some parents get a little bit of backlash, but for the most part, our teachers and our students, I think, appreciate it. And I don’t know if they tell you verbatim, but like I said, I think it has made some impacts in our classrooms and how they operate in those classrooms to make sure they’re better students.
Miller: We asked listeners on Facebook if they think phones have any place in schools.
Lucy Garrick wrote: “Yes and no, never during class time regardless of age, never for children in grammar or middle schools. For high schoolers, I think it’s OK for them to have them at school unless it disrupts their learning or becomes a thing like cyber bullying. In that case, I think it’s OK if schools take away phones during class day, put them in a lockbox or something.”
Christopher Lemons wrote: “I used to say no until they started having lockdowns because of threats of violence and school shootings. My daughter’s high school had a lockdown a couple of weeks ago due to a false threat via phone. It was nice to immediately know what was going on and that she was OK.”
It’s worth pointing out that we also got a similar point about lockdowns in an email from Megan Stout who basically said the same thing: “I want my kid to have a phone all the time just in case there are lockdowns or actual shootings.”
Nick Lupo, how do you respond to that point? I’ve seen this in other places from parents who say no, I want my kid to have a phone because I want to be able to get in touch with them any time I feel the need to.
Lupo: Yeah, I think that when I’ve had to answer those questions, I just talk about misinformation. We do a really good job. We have a safety coordinator here in the district. Their sole purpose is to create policies and procedures that the school then practices and give information to the kids of how to have a lockdown, go on a code if there is an inside threat or an outside threat. So we practice those throughout the year. And a lot of times what happens if we do have something happening on campus or out of campus, which we have in the past, we get people hearing and wanting to know more information.
So misinformation happens a lot with the communication aspect. I’ve talked to parents about this and said, we want to make sure we’re controlling that narrative coming from you from us to the public. And we want to make sure that we have control over who’s in our space. When we have people texting outright, posting stuff or saying some things through social media, it could cause mass hysteria when maybe it didn’t need to have that. We want to make sure that we’re keeping every kid safe when we have processes that we use to do that.
That’s where I always talk to parents, like, help us understand that if we’re going through this process, we’ll make sure that all the things we’re doing here at the school are for your student safety and we’re going to do our best to establish all of that. And that’s why we have phones in the classroom. That’s why we train our teachers. That’s why we train our admin and that’s why we work closely with our police department to have all those things in place.
Miller: And Gabe Pagano, before we say goodbye, I’m wondering if you have any rules or guidelines for teachers and staff in terms of having them model the kind of behavior that you’re expecting of students? I ask it because so many of us have phones, watches and connected devices that beep and bloop, and distract us in very similar ways.
Pagano: Yeah. I think that’s a really valid question, and I think if you were to ask that to a teacher at Cascade Middle School or if you were to come through the hallways that you would see the teachers modeling that exact same expectation that we have of the kids. If I have a teacher that has a lesson that they’re presenting and they can’t get through a lesson because of a cellphone, or they’re constantly on that, then boy, that would be something that I would have a conversation and a question as to why it seems like your cellphone is disrupting your teaching. And fortunately, that’s not the case.
We also can lean on trying, again as you said, to model those behaviors. But I think teachers understand that they’re working, they’re doing their job and they’re in front of their kids. So I haven’t really seen it as an issue. But it’s true, kids will follow what they see. So if our cell phones are off and away, or are used only when we’re in our offices, that’s what we try to model for them. I also tell kids, because I do work in a middle school, that I’m in my forties. I’ve had a lot of practice and I’ve had to get better at it. I’m trying to do those things. I think it’s important for kids to know, we don’t want them to be perfect. We’re just trying to get better at how we’re managing those tools.
I have a cellphone that’s on me and I use it to communicate with people in my building on specific things as Nick just mentioned, with school safety, the coming and going, and things that are needed. But again, we’re adults, our brains are fully formed and fully functioning. And we know that our kids don’t necessarily have those executive cognitive skills. Yeah, they’re still kids. So we, as adults, have to guide them through their needs.
Miller: Gabe Pagano and Nick Lupo, thanks very much.
Pagano: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Gabe Pagano is a principal of Cascade Middle School in the Bend-La Pine School District. Nick Lupo is a principal of Taft 7-12 Middle and High School in the Lincoln County School District.
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