Some Vermont schools will ban cellphones this year

For years, most schools in Vermont have had rules in place restricting student cellphone use in class. But this year, a handful of schools are taking their cues from a nationwide movement and going phone-free for the entire school day.

At least two schools — Harwood Union and Thetford Academy — have invested in lockable pouches made by the company Yondr. And in the Lamoille South Supervisory Union, which includes People’s Academy and Stowe High, students will be required to put their phones away in their lockers at the start of the day.

As schools across the country explore banning phones, it’s often pushback from parents that forces administrators to retreat. But in Lamoille South, according to superintendent Ryan Heraty, the opposite happened. After hearing that Harwood had decided to get rid of phones, Heraty surveyed the parents in his supervisory union. The response was so overwhelmingly in favor of banning the devices that he took it as “almost a mandate” to do so.

“Capitalizing on that momentum and knowing how distracting these devices have been for students and for teachers, I think it really was a no-brainer for us,” he said.

Social media use among teens is now basically universal, and public health and school officials have grown alarmed at surging rates of anxiety and depression in young people.

But the link between the two is not yet well understood. Research is growing on the topic, but has thus far yielded often weak or mixed associations between social media use and poor mental health.

Mostly, according to Dr. Breena Holmes, the president of the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the impacts of social media are highly variable depending on the child.

“There are people who have no trouble regulating what comes in their feed. There are people who are deeply influenced by it and it tanks their mental health. And then there's a group in the middle that come in and out of different engagement,” she said.

While excessive use is problematic, and can get in the way of things like sleep and exercise, Holmes emphasized that some children do benefit from social media.

“I don't want this to get lost in thinking there's a simple solution to this complex problem,” she said.

Federal officials have acknowledged gaps in the research — but argued that authorities do know enough to begin taking action.

“One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in a New York Times opinion piece calling on Congress to require warning labels for social media platforms, a move which drew pushback from researchers.

Vermont’s schools could wind up contributing to the growing body of science on the topic. Heraty, the superintendent at Lamoille South, said he’s been contacted by researchers at the University of North Carolina interested in studying the impact of the school’s new policy.

The belief that creating phone-free schools can make a real difference for youth mental health is the driving force behind a parent-led movement advocating for them. Laura Derrendinger, a mother of four in Middletown Springs, championed a bill in the Vermont Legislature last year that would have enacted a statewide school cellphone ban.

Derrendinger was recently a public health nurse for Doctors Without Borders. After watching children die abroad from things like malaria and malnutrition, she said she was shocked to learn about growing rates of suicide among youth in the U.S.

While Derrendinger said she doesn’t believe social media is the only reason behind that rise, she believes it’s enough of a contributing factor to act.

“We have enough data now to tell us it's a significant enough association to at least put the brakes on that influence,” she said.

Last year’s school phone ban legislation met opposition from most school groups, who argued it would be too impractical to enforce and that lawmakers should instead focus on regulating the social media platforms themselves. But Rep. Angela Arsenault, a Williston Democrat and local school board member, said she plans to reintroduce a similar bill again this year.

For her, the status-quo, in which phones remain accessible to students during the day, is what’s impractical.

“Pick, you know, your addiction of choice. Would we ever say to students, ‘Yeah, go ahead and bring that addictive substance into the classroom, but just please put it away'?” she said.

Atticus Ellis, a rising senior at Harwood Union Middle and High School in Moretown, supports his school's new policy — and the fact that the phones will be made physically inaccessible to students using lockable pouches. Students weren't technically supposed to use phones in class before, but certain teachers were better at enforcing those rules than others.

"With the inconsistency, it kind of made it harder for teachers who were trying to do it," he said.

Phone bans in schools are gaining bipartisan momentum. At least 11 states — red and blue alike — have passed statewide restrictions or outright bans on smartphones in schools, according to Education Week. And several states, including Vermont, have also sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging the company knowingly created addictive products with detrimental effects on adolescents.

National medical associations devoted to child health and well-being have asked governments to better regulate tech companies. But while they’ve also generally recommended that caregivers put limits on their children’s screen time, they have not gone as far as to endorse outright bans.

Echoing its national counterpart, the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics has not called for a statewide, blanket prohibition on phones in schools, and instead endorsed a local decision making process.

But Holmes said that if — in concert with teachers, parents and students — school districts decide to go phone-free, the Vermont AAP certainly wouldn’t oppose it, particularly if the educators believe it’ll remove distractions from the classroom.

“We, by all means, stand by the opportunity to try something different,” she said.

At Thetford Academy, rising senior Ulysses Junker is all for going phone-free. He’s already done it. After spending a semester at a school in Colorado where phones were prohibited, he returned to Vermont, and, as an experiment, stopped using his smartphone completely, including at home, for a period of about two months.

“Academically and socially, I just felt a boost,” he said. Instead of feeling left out, Junker said he felt more connected.

“I felt more social at home and with immediate relationships, because I wasn't constantly in conversation with everybody everywhere all the time,” he said.

Junker is upfront that many — if not most — of his peers aren’t thrilled about losing access to their phones at school. Some are already buying magnets so that they can unlock their Yondr pouches. He suspects that after an initial adjustment period, people will get used to it. But he also just thinks it’ll be an experiment.

“Everybody's going to get through it, or it's going to totally go up in flames,” he said. “Who knows? I don't even know. I just know that this is how my body and my mind reacted to this, and it was very positive.”

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