SUMMER 2025
In This Edition...
No Cell Phones at The Happiest School in Town
By Sarah Bromer, Pedagogical Director Desert Sage High School
In 2016, my oldest son was three and I was on a search for the perfect kindergarten. On a tour of a local public elementary school with a great reputation, I had what at the time seemed like a bizarrely dramatic moment with the principal.
We had entered the library, and the principal had briefly turned the tour over to the librarian. I was standing there with the rest of the parents when I felt her hand on my elbow. She pulled me behind a shelf and whispered conspiratorially, “There’s something wrong with the children.”
She seemed absolutely mad so I handled it the same way I would respond to my elderly grandfather when he would tell me that revolutionaries were coming up the driveway. Leaning in and widening my eyes, I whispered back “What is it??”
“They can’t sit in a circle,” she said. “And they can’t line up.” She told me they needed constant stimulation, and said I should pay more attention the next time I was at the grocery store. “Look around,” she said. “None of the toddlers sit in the cart and wait. They always have a screen. Then they get to kindergarten, and it’s the first time they’ve had to sit and do nothing, even for a minute. It’s the screens—I know it.”
At the time, I was a high school teacher at a socio-economically diverse, progressive charter school. My students all had phones, but only the wealthier ones had smartphones. And nothing seemed “wrong” with them. In fact, my colleagues and I marveled that, compared to our own teen selves, they were more mature, politically informed, and accepting of differences. Our students seemed to have only improved since the dawn of the internet. We saw less bullying, fewer fights, fewer pregnancies. The kids were alright.
At least, that’s what I thought. I still chuckle today about that principal’s intensity with me, but I have taken her warning more seriously with every passing year.
Her students, as the years passed, became my students. Conversations about what meds they took and what diagnoses they had became normal at lunch. Kids with IEPs “needed” their phones to cope with stress or overstimulation and seemed to spend much of the day sealed off from classmates, listening to music through headphones. Bullying moved almost exclusively to the world of social media, and “cancel culture” entered the scene. Many students were so anxious they could barely make it through the day and the guidance counselor was handing out weighted stuffed animals for them to hold on their laps.
Teachers and students alike spent more time on screens at school, both “for educational purposes” and for sneaking peeks at Facebook, shopping, and generally getting distracted. Teachers passed out Chromebooks with increasing frequency and settled in at their desks to “get work done” while the kids “researched.” The school became quieter.
Then the pandemic came along, and we all know what happened next. What had started as a worrying trend became a full-blown epidemic of teenage distraction, social anxiety, isolation, and depression.
Today I am the Pedagogical Director at Desert Sage High School, a Waldorf-inspired, public charter high school with a diverse population of about 90 students in grades 9-12. When I left my teaching job to help start this school four years ago, I made what was probably the best decision I’ve ever made in my 25 years of teaching—I vowed to completely remove phones from the classroom and the social environment of the school. Not “keep them in your backpacks” or “put them in the basket/shoe caddie” but away-away. Not “to be used for educational purposes only.” Not “to help you self-regulate.” Not “to listen to music while you write.”
I was done with the debate about whether the phone could be a useful tool in the classroom. I didn’t care if it was–to me, it was clear that the crazy principal was right. There was something wrong with the children, and it did have something to do with the screens. I wanted to see what would happen if we took them away.
It seemed like a lot when we paid $443 for our first metal phone locker, which held only 25 phones, but with every passing day I grow fonder of these cute little boxes, which sit at the threshold between the administrative area of our school and the student spaces.
The Rules
Phones must be locked up ten minutes before the school day begins and may not be retrieved until the end of the school day. During the last ten minutes of lunch, students may remove their phone from the locker and make a quick text or call, but they must stand in the small, administrative area to do so. Phones are not permitted in bathrooms, the lunchroom, outside, or in classrooms.
Outcome #1–Mischief
The first thing I noticed was the mischief. It had a new quality–namely, it had a physicality I hadn’t seen in years. Our freshmen and sophomores seemed immediately several years younger, almost like 5th graders. The developmental gulf between us and them became more apparent.
For instance, a few weeks after the school opened I walked into the student lounge at lunchtime to find Gage, a big 9th grade boy, attempting to lift a full-sized couch above his head. His buddies were spotting him, loosely, and girls were squealing in horror and delight. Gage was a kid who didn’t exercise, who came to school exhausted because he stayed up late watching gory videos. His t-shirts often had to be turned inside out because they featured axes and blood splatters. Gage looked happier, standing there with the couch teetering above his head– like a lawsuit waiting to happen– than I’d ever seen him. If he’d been allowed to have his phone at lunch, I’m sure he would have been slumped on the very same couch, watching something horrible. On my lunch duty sweep, I could have merely glanced into the room and kept walking. No confrontation necessary. No having to muster up my stern face, no having to stand strong in my own ego before a boy who weighed at least fifty pounds more than I did.
“Gage, put that couch down,” I said. Sheepishly, he complied.
That year I had to tell him repeatedly to put things down–the couch, the comfy chairs, tables, friends–but I also knew to call on him every time we had something heavy to move. He got really into arm wrestling his teachers at lunch (he can beat us all), and, to my surprise, jigsaw puzzles. Gage has since transformed himself into a serious bodybuilder who wears plain t-shirts and carries a gallon-sized milk jug filled with orange electrolyte drink everywhere he goes.
Other behaviors I’ve had to say “no” to over the past few years include: running in the lunchroom, piggy back rides in the halls, hanging from the rafters in the school hall, climbing on top of the shipping container in the parking lot, shaving each other’s heads in the bathroom, and “pretending to be gorillas.” In class there is more talking and passing of notes.
It’s more work for the adults, frankly, but the thing about this new, old-fashioned mischief is that it’s embodied. It takes place in the physical realm. The girls pass notes written with pens, on paper, and they pass them through other humans, hand-to-hand, instead of sending invisible virtual notes through the cell phone tower on the corner. When the boys grunt and leap around like gorillas, they do so on the floor, and they crash into each other’s physical bodies, rather than sitting in isolation on couches, beating up each other’s avatars in video games.
Why does any of that matter? Why is a physical note better for teens than a text? Well, for one thing it has literal weight and permanence. It can be intercepted, thrown in the garbage, or lovingly saved in a shoebox for twenty years. It’s more obviously real, which makes its impact and the associated risks easier for a teenager to understand.
And why shouldn’t teenage boys sit on couches and hurt each other in video games instead of in real life? After all, it’s less actual violence. I know it’s certainly more comfortable for me to see a bunch of teenage boys sitting on couches instead of slamming into each other and possibly knocking a table over while pretending to be gorillas. But what is lost when we take this away? How can teenagers learn where the edges of their rapidly growing bodies are, or how far is too far to push a friend, if the majority of their interactions are happening on a phone?
Happiness
I like to call our school “the happiest high school in town.” Of course our students suffer all the normal slings and arrows of adolescence. Drama abounds. But students who haven’t been able to connect with other kids for years are making friends for the first time. Mothers tell me, “I got my daughter back this year.” Two boys who haven’t had a non-virtual friend since fifth grade are hanging out at the edge of the basketball court at lunch every day. They talk a little bit and stare a lot, but they are together–IRL, as they say. A girl who was terrified to come to school after some kids at her old school videotaped her under a bathroom stall has stopped crying and fighting with her mother every morning. By October, most of the panic attacks in new students have subsided.
Learning and Test Scores
At my old school, I eventually came to the conclusion that nobody was hurt more, academically, by screen use than students who were struggling. The kids who were supposed to benefit most from the “tool” were the first to misuse it.
When you take away screens, kids who struggle academically lose one of their preferred escape hatches. There’s always sleeping, of course, but as long as your teachers can keep you awake, the odds of you actually learning something are exponentially higher in a screen free school.
We are a public school and depend on our standardized test scores to keep our doors open. Our progress with math has been painfully slow, but the writing scores of our students are off the charts compared to students from similar demographics. Our teachers deserve most of the credit for our students’ academic growth, of course, but sometimes I joke that by locking up the phones and chromebooks and making the students write by hand we’re giving them an unfair advantage.
Pushback
Surprisingly, though most of our students come from middle schools where they were allowed to carry their phones, they rarely complain about the lockers. The greatest pushback by far comes from parents, who are used to being in constant contact with their children throughout the day. We reassure them that students may always come to the front desk and use the school phone to call home, and parents may of course call us. But what if there is a school shooter, they wonder. I tell them that the best way to prevent school shootings is to maintain a healthy social climate at school, where every kid is known well and feels connected ( there is research to support this claim). With particularly resistant parents, I always offer an alternative–buy your child a prepaid flip phone at Walmart. We allow flip phones to be carried in backpacks as long as students don’t take them out. So far, only one parent has actually taken me up on this offer.
Special Circumstances
What about when someone is in the hospital? Our response to this situation is that students with a family member in the hospital (or a pet at the veterinarian) are given special permission to be excused from class to come to the front desk and check their cell phone as many times as day as needed, and may even have permission to carry their own phone locker key around with them—but they may not carry their phones in their backpacks.
What about kids with IEPs who have accommodations that permit them to carry phones or chromebooks from class to class? This is the River Rubicon as far as I’m concerned, and I just won’t cross it. The most common accommodation I see is “she may listen to music to self-regulate while doing independent work.” I always offer to buy students with this legal accommodation a CD walkman and CDs of all their favorite music so they may always have music on hand. The students never take me up on this offer.
Details about our System
After students lock up their phones, they place their numbered key in a small basket on the front desk. Each key is affixed with a tiny circle of velcro, and when all the keys are collected, we place each key on a clipboard with a corresponding number and velcro circle. This extra step takes some time, but it is a surprisingly satisfying task, and makes handing the keys out so much easier at the end of the day.
Checking the lockers needs to be done daily for the first few months of school and frequently thereafter. Students must be asked, “Did you by chance forget to put away your phone?” and sometimes parents must be called and asked, “Did so-and-so really forget her phone on her bed today?”The system needs constant maintenance, but as with most things, a little frontloading goes a long way.
Sometimes students bring two phones to school and put one in the locker and one in their backpack. Because taking the second phone out of the backpack would result in an immediate reveal of their deception, we generally never see the second phone. If other students see the second phone they tend to run and tell us immediately because it seems like such a terrible injustice to them.
Conclusion
We worry a lot about the physical safety of children. Most of us would feel slightly nervous dropping our kids off at the New York Public Library, especially without cell phone contact. But the internet is like the largest public library on earth, a library with no rule-enforcing librarians, a library that has every great book and work of art, but which also has a billiard hall full of creeps, a pornographic movie theater, and a room where you can watch live beheadings. And we drop our kids off there every day and say, “just don’t go into those rooms, okay?”
The average American teenager spends more than 8 hours a day as a glassy-eyed visitor in this giant library. The terrain they travel there is endlessly vast, but it’s literally only a centimeter deep. And when they go there, they leave this world, which is both vast and endlessly deep.
How much healthy social development is lost in those eight hours? It’s a question that’s almost too painful to answer.
The outdoor educator David Sobel said, “if we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, then let us allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it.” You can’t love something you don’t know, and you can’t know this world if you don’t live in it.
Recently two of our students performed a song about our cell phone lockers at our Spring Showcase. It was a spoof of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
So miss me and charge for me,
Tell me that you’ll wait for me,
Wait for me like you’re in airplane mode.
‘Cause I’m locking you up again
And I’ll be back a little after 3:10.
Oh, phone, I hate to go-oh-oh.
It was funny to think of the phone as an abandoned girlfriend, and the singers as tortured by their separation, but what made the song work as a joke is that the way teenagers feel about their phones is nothing like love at all.
The music of the two friends filled the hall, and all the students smiled and laughed together. I was the only one filming.
Sarah Bromer is the Pedagogical Director at Desert Sage High School in Tucson, Arizona. Desert Sage is a member of The Alliance for Public Waldorf Education.
Spring/Summer 2022
