Before the state banned them, Chemistry teacher Lyn Vinskus didn’t consider cell phones to be a persistent problem in her Concord High School classroom. Still, there were issues.
A student would go to the bathroom, phone in hand, and return visibly agitated. Someone would be texting in class and push back when asked to put the device away, saying they were texting their mom, or their boss, and it was an emergency.
“There were times where it ended up causing a conflict with between me and certain students that I didn’t really want to have,” Vinskus said.
This past school year, with New Hampshire’s new state bell-to-bell cell phone ban, things are different.
For Vinskus, the biggest change has been in student attitudes.
Concord High doesn’t use lockers, so Vinskus said she and some other teachers were skeptical about what enforcing the new law would look like. Students had largely always been asked to keep their phones stowed, with mixed results.
With a uniform statewide policy, students began to accept — even embrace — a phone-free learning environment.
“I overall had a sense that kids were trying to be less sneaky,” she said. “There was sort of permission for them not to need to have their phones, and it seemed like in my classes students were okay with it.”
She, too, felt some relief.
“I enjoyed the fact that it wasn’t the student perception that it was me being the mean one,” she said.
After the first year of the new law, Gov. Kelly Ayotte and the state Department of Education are reporting positive reviews from New Hampshire teachers. The move was one of the governor’s top policy initiatives.
Teachers and administrators said the ban meaningfully reduced phone usage in class, and that students were more focused, more social with one another and more engaged with learning, according to polling results.
About three-quarters of educators said they either never or rarely saw phones out in class compared to a year ago. A similar majority said students were less distracted as a result. About two-thirds said they saw a student with their phone out at least once per class period.
New Hampshire is one of 40 states with some kind of cell phone regulation in schools, per the Education Commission of the States. Multiple states are considering new rules or expanding existing restrictions to cover more of the school day and more student age groups.
Kim Bleier, a Concord High social studies teacher who is the president of the teachers’ union, advocated for New Hampshire’s ban.
She is among those who report her students as more engaged with their learning, but she highlighted social benefits, too.
In the hallways, Bleier said she used to have to avoid bumping into students looking down at their phones.
“It was kind of weirdly silent,” she said. Now, her students are talking and laughing more. In passing periods and at lunch, “the audible difference is obvious.”
To Bleier, whose courses include sociology and street law, the improvement in sociability and social skills is also an academic improvement.
From mock trials to group puzzles she assigns, interactive work where students are thinking critically in groups is happening faster and smoother than it was before.
The itch to constantly check their phones, the anxiety of missing a notification, seems to be fading, she said. Some students acknowledge the relief.
“A lot of them prefer it this way,” she said. “A lot of them will say, ‘I am learning more, I am getting more work done and enjoying the classroom experience again.'”
Still, it is in teens’ developmental nature to try to find workarounds, Bleier noted.
“The beginning of the school year was great and easy,” she said. “Then the honeymoon period was over, and you had students trying to sneak their phones in again. So I think districts now need to look at what’s next.”
To Bleier, this movement to get phones out of classrooms should, and already is, fueling a bigger reconsideration of student screen time.
In Concord, all older students and many younger students have what’s called a one-to-one device – an assigned tablet or Chromebook for personal schoolwork.
On a surface level, many students have found ways to use these devices to access social media and other messaging apps during the school day, undercutting the purpose of the phone ban to reduce distractions.
More broadly, though, educators are reconsidering the necessity of screentime in the post-COVID classroom.
“[One-to-one devices] were so critical to get us through COVID, but now that we’re face-to-face again, they’re not as critical as they once were,” she said. “In fact, in a lot of cases, they’re creating a new problem.”
In Concord, the school board has asked elementary school teachers to evaluate how much time the district’s younger learners spend on screens. This was prompted both by a concern about screen time and also as an effort to reduce how much the district spends buying and replacing small tech devices for classrooms.
Vinskus already does nearly everything in her classroom pen-to-paper, she said, something she deliberately has returned to in recent years.
“Everything had been sort of converted to an online version in some way because of COVID, and I think the following year people just went with that,” she said. “I made a conscious choice to change the things that I was doing… to make it a more in-person, hands-on, kind of interactive thing where they weren’t just on their Chromebooks.”
While students must learn how to apply technology to their learning in certain cases, the gains of less screentime are evident, she said.
“If they can be doing the work, talking to each other, having discussions, doing things on paper, I feel like that’s better,” Vinskus said.
