3 Schools, 3 Principals, 3 Cell Phone Bans

Originally published by Paige Tutt for Edutopia

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Recently, 16-year-old sophomore Olivia walked into Principal Matteo Doddo’s office to deliver a piece of unexpected news: “I got more work done today than I’ve gotten done for the last two weeks,” she said, surprising even herself. “I didn’t have to worry about my cell phone.”

Only 24 hours prior, as the school approached the start date of the new phone policy, the same student was standing in front of him experiencing something like a panic attack. The sight of an empty Yondr pouch sitting on the large wooden table in his office had set Olivia’s nerves alight. Yondr representatives, who market the lockable receptacles as a “patented system to create phone-free spaces,” had warned Doddo that this was inevitable: For some kids, locking their phones away was going to be traumatic, at least initially. That anticipatory Monday, Olivia’s hand trembled as she hovered her phone over the pouch to see if it would fit inside, keeping a safe distance almost out of fear that “it was going to bite her,” Doddo recalls.

But the next day, despite her nerves, Olivia and 900 other ninth- to 12th-grade students at Newburgh Free Academy’s North Campus in Newburgh, New York, stored their phones in Yondr pouches for the duration of the school day. In a month’s time, 2,200 other students at the school’s main campus would follow suit...

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Article continues at https://www.edutopia.org/article/cell-phone-bans-schools-principals-weigh-in