| In his Arabic class last year, Emeka Forman recalls looking around the room and seeing every student looking down at their phones, sucked in by the algorithms of Instagram and TikTok videos. “The teacher was basically talking to a wall of phones,” Forman recalls. This year, for the first time, his high school banned devices. The change has been noticeable. Students are more engaged with what the teacher is saying. They’re having more conversations with each other. There are also fewer fights, which he attributes to students feeling more at ease. “The school climate has improved greatly,” says Forman, a junior at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, Connecticut. “You feel more connected to people.” It’s no secret that extensive screen time is bad for our health. Now, we’re in the early innings of a social experiment that could tell us whether going phone-free at school can improve the education and mental health of America’s youth. Last month, at the start of the academic year, New York joined the ranks of states requiring students, from kindergarten to high school, to put away their devices during the school day. More than half of states in the US now ban or limit cellphone use in schools, according to Ballotpedia. For the most part, parents agree with the restrictions. Almost three-quarters of US adults support banning phones for middle and high school students during class, according to a Pew Research Center survey in June. Some parents have pushed back, however, saying they want their kids to have phones during the school day to communicate with them. In New York and other states, there are exceptions to the bans, like if a student needs a phone for medical reasons, translating or as part of a special education plan. Teenagers spend an average of 1.5 hours each school day on their smartphones, according to a study published earlier this year in JAMA Pediatrics. One of the coauthors of the study, Lauren Hale, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, predicted that limiting phones in schools will reduce students’ anxiety because they won’t be consumed with fear of missing out or not getting likes on their social media posts. How much this will improve students’ mental health isn’t clear. In one study, researchers in the UK compared students from schools where phone use is not permitted with those where it’s allowed. The researchers found no evidence that the restrictions improved students’ wellbeing. But there was a caveat: Kids who couldn’t use their phones during the school day made up for it by spending more time on their devices outside of school. The researchers said that schools should develop phone policies “as part a more holistic approach,” noting that frequent device use affects students’ sleep, physical activity and overall behavior. “If you remove the phones during school, you might see improved outcomes for learning, but maybe not for mental health because so much is happening during after-school and the evening hours,” Hale said. Forman’s school enforces its ban by requiring students to put their phone in pouch at the start of the day. The pouches can only be unlocked by a magnet given to students at the end of the day. As you can imagine, the ban was not initially popular with students. After announcing the policy at a school assembly last year, the principal was booed off stage, Forman said. Yet Forman said he’s more calm without his phone at school. He’s not waiting for another social media notification. There’s no Instagram video to make him sad or upset. He isn’t getting into disagreements with friends over text message. His classmates seem different, too. “When people aren’t on social media or texting all day, they don’t have as much to be mad about,” he said. “They are a lot more peaceful.” — Gerry Smith | 
