Students in an Iowa school district have been heaping praise on a recent cell phone ban, saying that it has freed up their focus for more important things.
Ottumwa Community School District implemented a cell phone ban last week at the start of the school season, and students and faculty have already been noticing a difference. Per The Midwesterner:
[Gateway High School Principal Aaron] Ruff and others in the Ottumwa Community School District recently explained to KCRG how the learning experience has improved since students were required to lock their phones away this year, following several other area districts and schools that have implemented similar policies.
The shift came from a group including students that studied the impacts of rising cell phone use on bullying, learning, and student mental health, concluding less phone use could improve all three.
Ottumwa High School Principal Shelley Bramchreiber told the Ottumwa Post that the schools would be implementing the ban after seeing positive effects in certain schools.
“In about mid-June, we began to think and realize that our district was going to be cell phone free K-9 because it had already been determined that our elementaries were, Liberty was and Evans Junior High had piloted it in the spring and it went super well,” said Bramchreiber.
“So the question came to us what if we did a district wide ban? We began a gathering committee with students, community members, staff members, administrators, central office staff and board members. We tried to gather stakeholders from every realm to be part of this committee to see what it would look like in our schools,” she added.
Students voiced their approval after one week. The policy requires them to lock their phones in a cabinet while on campus during school hours.
“That was kind of like my anchor, but (the phone ban) has helped me find new ways to cope,” Ottumwa High School Principal Shelley Bramchreiber told reporters.
“I think my attention has kind of skyrocketed if that’s the word,” Gateway senior Madison Shoop said. “I was more focused on, like, my phone, and, oh, my gosh, is that going to go off?”
“I just think I was so addicted to it that it was hard for me to look away personally, for me to look away like I would just be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling scrolling. At points in time when my mom talked to me, like, I couldn’t hear because I had my headphones in, I was scrolling through my phone, and I wasn’t paying attention,” Shoop added.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this year, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s board voted 5-2 in favor of banning cell phones and social media use during the day amid outcry from educators.
The ban in Los Angeles public schools will go into effect come spring 2025 and goes beyond the previous district policy of only banning cell phones during class instruction while limiting social media to “educational purposes.” The ban comes following a Pew Research Center poll showing that 72 percent of high school teachers in the United States believe cell phone use has become “a major problem in the classroom.” As noted by CNN, the previous policy took effect in 2011 and became relatively toothless in the face of smartphone use exploding over the past decade.
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