When she entered Concord High School for her final first day of school, senior Mika Taylor predicted widespread student defiance of the new statewide ban on personal communication devices.
“I’ll be respectful about it,” she said that late August morning, “but I don’t actually know how much it’s going to be enforced.”
Six hours later, Taylor’s view had shifted. The first day of school featured teachers “patrolling” during lunch and a change to the Wi-Fi system that turned the building into a “pit” of disconnection.
“It was actually super strict,” she reported that afternoon.
Still, while she understood the academic benefits of banning phones in class, Taylor viewed the bell-to-bell component of the new law as misguided. A state champion alpine skier, she worried it would disrupt vital communication about sports practices and other after-school activities and force students to switch from using their personal computers to school-issued Chromebooks.
Three months into New Hampshire’s new phone-free reality, the Concord Monitor checked back in with Taylor — and with other students, administrators and parents — to see how they were adjusting.
The prevailing sentiment was that the transition had gone more smoothly than many expected. Students were largely complying with the new law, and feared clashes with teachers and administrators over enforcement-related issues had not materialized, according to those interviewed.
“We’re pleasantly surprised,” Pembroke Academy Headmaster Derek Hamilton said. “We thought that there would be some pushback, some unwillingness to follow these procedures, even just challenges kind of breaking away from it, and the students have been great.”
Most people said they believed the ban had improved students’ focus in class and changed how they socialize outside of it — primarily, for the better. High school principals reported louder lunch periods, which they characterized as a positive development. Taylor said the lunchtime vibe shift has led her to engage with new people, a rarity for many seniors.
“People are a lot more present,” she said. “I definitely have branched out. I talk to a lot more people than I did in past years.”
The ban has also posed challenges. In certain high school courses, phone use has become so embedded in the curriculum that it has proven difficult to disentangle. Coaches, parents and students have also struggled to adapt to communicating with each other about shifting after-school plans.
“That’s definitely a prominent issue, because the bus times would change and no one would have any clue,” said Concord High senior Abby D’Agostino, a member of her school’s volleyball team.
Those interviewed also reported some unexpected consequences.
Students with open campus privileges are taking advantage of the freedom to leave school more frequently because doing so allows them access to their phones. And inside school, students have gotten creative about how to communicate, relying both on a constellation of new apps and some old ones.
Perhaps the biggest surprise: Email is making a comeback.
“I emailed [Taylor] the other day about when a project was due,” D’Agostino said. “Normally, I would just text her about it, because it was the next period. But I do think that other students use it more as like constant communication.”
Still, administrators, teachers and students were largely united in their belief that the ban has been a net positive.
“I think overall it’s good,” Taylor said. “It’s annoying — yes. I get frustrated sometimes with it. But for my education, it has been helpful, which is the whole point of school.”
Compliance
At Franklin High School, 49 out of 280 students were caught with a personal communication device during the first quarter of the school year, a violation rate of 18%. Twelve of those students ultimately committed a second device infraction.
At Pembroke Academy, one to two students out of roughly 725 are caught violating the law per day.
Both Hamilton and his counterpart at Franklin High, Principal David Levesque, said they have been thrilled by the rates of compliance they are seeing in their schools. As a reward, Levesque said he would reset the three-tier system at the beginning of the second quarter so that students started at zero violations.
Hamilton attributed the widespread compliance in part to the perceived severity of the punishment, which involves requiring a parent to retrieve the phone after it is confiscated.
“That’s a motivator for folks, from what we understand,” he said. “Nobody wants to lose access to their phone at the end of the day and have to count on someone else to come pick it up.”
During the summer, the big debate surrounded exactly how to prevent phone use. Both Hamilton and Levesque considered more restrictive approaches, such as pouches, but ultimately nixed them. The school leaders said they were happy they ultimately settled on the least restrictive approach.
Neither was naive to the fact that students may evade detection while using personal devices, such as by going to the bathroom, but they said other approaches could have caused issues of their own.
“If we were to take them out of their hands, they’d find other ways to do different things,” Levesque said. “I appreciate our least restrictive version.”
‘Exponential’ improvements in the classroom
Students and administrators said the effect of the ban in classrooms has been significant.
“I’ve visited 70 different classrooms this year and the level of student participation has grown exponentially,” Levesque said. “Kids are doing things together, they’re focusing more, and it allows us as teachers to be more creative and allow students to take risks and push the rigor in their academic courses.”
D’Agostino, the Concord High senior, said that while students were never supposed to be on their phones during class, there is a difference between a school rule and a state law.
“Now that it’s completely banned, I’m not reaching for it in class,” she said. “And because no one else is on it, it kind of gets rid of the FOMO that everyone has. You don’t have the need to check it because literally no one in the entire country is on their phone from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.”
(States have adopted different approaches to banning phones in schools. New Hampshire’s law is among the strictest.)
The largest academic challenge the ban has posed has come in classes that relied on the devices for photos, videos and niche education apps.
In one of Concord High English teacher Heather Ouellette-Cygan’s classes, for example, the customary first assignment involves producing a video of a classroom rule. This year, she got special permission to allow her students to use their phones, but the school plans to order digital cameras for the future.
At Franklin High, Levesque’s search for a substitute to students’ phones led him to an old closet where he located some standalone cameras from the mid-2000s. Predictably, they didn’t work, and the school is now considering whether they should buy new ones.
Like many others, Levesque believes the state should have chipped in to fund technology upgrades when it passed the law.
“The state should really support this,” he said. “This is a ban that they put in place.”
The office of Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who made the ban a hallmark of her first-year legislative agenda, did not respond to requests for an interview.
A new communication landscape
Epsom parent Tanya Davis worried over the summer that the bell-to-bell ban would cause widespread communication challenges for her “hyper-scheduled” family. Both her children, a junior and senior at Pembroke Academy, play sports and have jobs. This fall, her son captained the soccer team, adding another layer to his communication responsibilities with his teammates and coach.
Davis said that while she believed the ban had improved her son’s focus, she still felt the bell-to-bell component unnecessarily complicated their family life.
The family has developed some workarounds for communication during the day: Sometimes, Davis’s daughter emails her during the day, and other times, Davis communicates information through the main office. But there are instances, she said, when she can’t get in touch with her children.
Recently, when her son’s car needed work, “we ended up having to wait a whole extra day to pick it up because I couldn’t communicate with him to find out when he’d be available,” she said.
The biggest change for the Davis family and other students was where they spend their free periods. Previously, Davis’s daughter would pass that time on homework in the library. Now, she often goes elsewhere.
“Since she can’t listen to music on her phone or text her friends, she will leave and sometimes go to a cafe or something and hang out there and maybe do her homework or not,” Davis said.
When Davis’s son has to share logistical details during the day with his teammates, “sometimes he just walks around and looks for them and sometimes he waits and has an open campus and he’ll send them a message and hope that they see it before it’s too late.”
Some students, typically more knowledgeable about technology than the adults in their lives, have gotten creative. At Franklin High, Google Docs has become a hotbed of real-time communication. At Concord High, students have cycled through a constant stream of niche game websites.
“There will be a website that people will use for a week and then that will get blocked and then people find a new one and then that one will get blocked and then people will find a new one,” D’Agostino said. “It just keeps going.”
But the social ramifications have also played out in more wholesome ways. At Franklin High, Levesque said students have participated in trivia and chess tournaments at lunchtime. At Concord High, the card game Uno has staged a comeback.
“Engagement is up,” Taylor said, while phone-based “communication is down.”
