Bethel, Springfield reflect on school phone ban, as 4J prepares its own

The chatter in the hallways and lunchroom is louder. The teachers tell students to “keep the volume down” during class transitions. And the students’ retro baggy jeans are now accompanied by retro tech like Discmans and MP3 players.

This school year, high schoolers in Bethel and Springfield school districts are spending less time on their phones during school hours, thanks to the new personal electronic device ban mandated by Gov. Tina Kotek. Eugene School Distric 4J will begin its personal electronic device ban after winter break.

The ban on devices, including cellphones, smartwatches and wireless earbuds, has led to kids checking out more library books and having more face-to-face conversations — and conflict.

Three-and-a-half months into enforcing Kotek’s executive order, which has created the biggest rule changes in high schools, administrators and students from Bethel School District and Springfield Public Schools have mixed opinions on how it’s going.

How the ban is enforced

Springfield’s Thurston High School rolled out the phone policy in the first week of school, sticking with the black-and-white language of Kotek’s order.

The first time a staff member catches a student at Thurston with a phone or other banned electronic device out of their backpack, an administrator or other staff member takes the device to the front office and the student collects it at the end of the day. The second time, a parent must pick it up, and the third time, administrators create a contract with the students that either requires them to keep their device at home or in the front office during the school day.

Thurston administrators in Springfield started the year by collecting about 20 to 25 phones a day, said Jared Taylor, Thurston’s dean of students. Now they collect six to seven a day (no “6-7” slang intended, he quickly added).

Principal Kimberlee Pelster said so far, only 32 students out of about 1,100 students have needed a contract.

Taylor said parents have generally been supportive of the policy, joking that one asked him if the school could keep their child’s phone over winter break.

Alyssa Dodds, principal of Willamette High School in the Bethel district, said some parents told her to keep their child’s phone overnight after it was taken during a school day.

At Willamette, students not only put their phones in their backpacks, but they are supposed to also put them in Yondr pouches that magnetically lock and can only be opened by a special magnet. 

At the start of the school year, Dodds said they’d check to make sure every student had their phone in a locked pouch when they came through the door. But with about 15 entrances and exits to the school, it was an impossible task. Now they trust that even if the student doesn’t lock their phone in their Yondr pouch, they’ll keep it in their bag or leave it in their car.

Willamette senior Jayna Thompson, 17, said students have found ways to hide phones, sometimes in baggy clothes. She said students have also sussed out which hall and lunchroom monitors are strict and which ones aren’t.

“In my experience, a lot of people don’t follow” the policy, she said.

Thompson said none of her friends have had phones taken away, but one had headphones confiscated.

Pelster said the enforcement workload decreased as the school year progressed, which was a relief for support staff. But the friction of taking devices and disciplining students for their device use has, at times, been taxing on administrators’ relationships with students, Taylor said, because the policy has no wiggle room for negotiation.

During the first week back from winter break, 4J students will have a “learning period,” where they will receive verbal warnings for having devices out. Starting Jan. 12, staff will first give a verbal warning, then take the phone to the office and contact parents if phone use is repeated, and create a similar arrangement to Thurston’s “contract” if students continue to use a device.

Conflict looks different

As dean, Taylor was used to dealing with online harassment that would build throughout the day and inevitably spill into his office.

It was always hard, however, to parse out exactly what was happening in conflicts that occurred on social media or in text messages.

“It was like we were always just dealing with the tip of the iceberg, and we knew that there was so much that was just unreported that was out there,” he said.

Online harassment was also invisible to adults at school, which made it impossible to observe and intervene. In-person harassment or bullying is easier to spot and differentiate from mutual conflict, Pelster said.

Taylor knows that online harassment still happens outside of school hours, but he’s relieved students aren’t seeing it during the school day, when their minds can be occupied with hurtful words. 

“It’s better to fight a war on one front than two fronts,” he said. “By not having that as an aspect of school behavior, I think it just makes it so now we can just deal with the personal relationships.”

Pelster also said students used to loop in parents to their school-day conflicts without administrators knowing. This sometimes led students to go home early without the school having all of the information as to why. 

“I think that this is also repairing trust with families — that we are here to help,” Pelster said. “The parent doesn’t have to be on call all day long to help with conflicts that are happening at school. We have adults right here on campus who can help with that.”

Student, teacher feedback 

Thompson, the Willamette senior, used to use her phone at lunch to play music. Her and her friends’ favorite activity was singing along to their favorite songs.

She now brings an MP3 player she got last Christmas.

“I enjoy it, it’s different than using my phone for music, but it works similar,” she said.

Thompson thinks the phone policy is a good idea, but doesn’t like the uniformity.

“I think there should be times during the school day that we can use them, because I think they can be beneficial,” she said.

Pelster said student body leaders have told her in meetings they see the ban forcing their peers to interact more with each other, which they see as a positive.

4J student school board representatives expressed concern about how the personal electronic device policy will play out in their high schools. Depending on the school, students will store their phones in designated storage areas or in their backpacks, but consequences will be uniform across schools.

“Students are worried that each teacher is going to have a slightly different way of enacting this policy, we’re worried that our teachers are going to have to be dealing with this in the classroom instead of teaching,” Sheridan Schilling of Churchill High School said at the Dec. 10 board meeting. “Throughout the next semester, observation and data collection will be beneficial in determining what works and what doesn’t for our students.”

Teachers in Bethel and Springfield enjoy the device ban. Thurston teachers told Pelster they felt like they got to know their students much faster this fall and focus in class has been better.

Dawn Caird, algebra II and AP calculus teacher at Thurston, said that while her highest achievers could focus with their phones out — and her lowest achievers get distracted even without phones — her average achievers benefited most from the phone ban.

Recently, in the last few minutes before the bell rang, a student asked Caird what she was doing that weekend, something that rarely would happen before the ban.

“I feel like they see me more as a person,” she said. “And then I get to know them a little bit more as individuals instead of just a student.”