This St. Louis school district banned smartphones entirely

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The first day of the Normandy Schools Collaborative’s “zero tolerance” smartphone ban didn’t quite “go over without a hitch,” observed Norman Campbell, the district’s safety and security director, at the board of education’s meeting last week. At the high school and middle school, where combined enrollment is about 1,200, staff confiscated roughly 300 phones on January 13. They were discovered via metal detectors and wands. Some kids were “pretty innovative” in their smuggling attempts, Campbell said, and some “were a little bit belligerent” about the new policy.

Even so, the majority of the violators “readily gave up their phones,” he said. The board’s president, Harlan Hodge, acknowledged it was a big ask: “These are drastic measures because these are drastic times.”

That’s true everywhere as districts try to manage the use of those addictive miracle machines in everyone’s back pocket. But the crisis is especially acute at Normandy, which, according to Campbell, has experienced all manner of smartphone-facilitiated dysfunction as of late: scheduled fights in the bathroom, cyberbullying, the release of intimate texts. Just as worrisome is the fact that, in terms of academics, Normandy sits in the bottom three percentile of public districts in Missouri.

Will Normandy’s new ban help turn things around? The science on restriction policies is only just starting to trickle in, as I pointed out  in August. Jonathan Haidt, the New York University professor whose book, The Anxious Generation, ignited a heated debate on this subject, favors “phone-free schools.” He has begun compiling research on the effects of such policies. So far, he has posted six studies. All were conducted in Europe, and the results so far are mixed. 

But there is a large body of research on a key factor of youth smartphone use: self-regulation. And that research helps explain why so many districts are trying so many different things: Not all students walk into school with the same minds.

To self-regulate is to manage your thoughts and feelings in order to work toward goals. This is tough for all early and mid adolescents (ages 11–15) because inside their heads, according to a brief published by the federal Administration for Children and Families, the brain systems that “seek rewards and process emotions are more developed than the cognitive control systems responsible for good decision-making and future planning.” Self-regulation is particularly hard, the brief continues, for kids dealing with toxic stress—that is, ones whose systems are overloaded as they cope with things such as “physical or emotional abuse, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and the accumulated burdens of poverty.”

Certainly, “poverty” is not an accurate label for many blocks within the two dozen municipalities that make up Normandy’s school district, but that footprint does have the highest concentration of poverty on the Missouri side of the St. Louis region, the nonprofit Beyond Housing has found. And it may well be true that the majority of children there don’t suffer from toxic stress, but it doesn’t take many who do (and who struggle with self-regulation) to disrupt school.

The good news, however, is that even for those kids, self-regulation can be taught, the brief says. And that’s why Normandy’s smartphone ban could foster such teaching.

Normandy has tried other policies. It bought Yondr pouches—opaque, thick-fabric sacks that are locked and unlocked with a magnetic tool. Students “destroyed” them, Campbell has said, or deposited “dummy phones” so they could use their real ones on the sly. Normandy then tried to give students more agency and allow possession, but not use, of phones during class. Students didn’t adhere to that policy either, Campbell said.

Why not? The district didn’t respond to phone calls and emails. Katie Rosanbalm, associate research professor at Duke University’s Center for Child & Family Policy, says a lack of adherence can have several explanations. Sometimes teachers feel stretched too thin to enforce restrictions. Sometimes even those students who can self-regulate don’t see a reason to. “If a student doesn’t even think they’re going to graduate or doesn’t have a plan for the future,” Rosanbalm says, “then even if they have capacity for self regulation, they have no motivation to use it.” For kids who do feel toxic stress, Rosanbalm says, phones are an escape—the classic “flight” alternative to “fight” or “freeze.” But phones prevent them from paying attention in class, which brings its own problems. 

What sets those kids up for success is minimizing their need to self-regulate—by restricting their options. “There’s a lot of research that likens self-regulation to a muscle that you have to build up,” she says. “If we’ve got an environment where kids are in constant reach of phones, they’ll be more exhausted.” In that sense, allowing those kids to have their phones in their pockets or backpacks is like asking them to bench press 300 pounds.

The best healing for kids with toxic stress, Rosanbalm says, comes from relationships with adults who model self-regulation and teach skills that strengthen it. When teachers must act as the smartphone police, you get “conflict instead of connection,” she says. That’s why she favors solutions like classroom caddies or phone lockers, which put the devices completely out of reach. That way, the teacher need not navigate ambiguity about whether the device is being used for a classroom purpose: If a student is fiddling with a phone during class, it’s automatically a violation.

Normandy’s total ban goes a step further. Some worry about unintended consequences. At last week’s board meeting, board secretary/treasurer Violet Taylor echoed a concern of many Normandy parents: That some kids walk home alone after school, and now they’ll be incommunicado when they do so. But Campbell said that the various police departments within the district had arranged for a “heavier presence” of officers since school started.

“So we will continue this,” Campbell said, “and obviously not everybody is going to agree with it, but this is the mandate.”

And the mandate has emerged from district leaders who clearly feel exasperated about some of their students’ failure to self-regulate. At a community forum in December, Normandy’s superintendent, Michael Triplett, made this explicit. Many jobs and professions, he pointed out, prohibit smartphone use during work hours. That’s the reality that awaits students after high school. They must get used to it now. “One of the biggest lessons that we have to teach our babies, aside from instructional things,” Triplett said, “is how to coexist in a world with rules.”