‘Over-regulation is going to create sneakier kids’: Concord High students react to impending bell-to-bell phone ban

Concord Monitor education reporter Jeremy Margolis spoke with Concord High School students on Friday, June 13, to get their thoughts on phone usage in school. Veronica Galdieri (left) and Aryn Bernardo (right) participated in the conversation.

Concord Monitor education reporter Jeremy Margolis spoke with Concord High School students on Friday, June 13, to get their thoughts on phone usage in school. Veronica Galdieri (left) and Aryn Bernardo (right) participated in the conversation. Rachel Wachman—Monitor staff

Concord Monitor education reporter Jeremy Margolis spoke with Concord High School students on Friday, June 13, to get their thoughts on phone usage in school.

Concord Monitor education reporter Jeremy Margolis spoke with Concord High School students on Friday, June 13, to get their thoughts on phone usage in school. Rachel Wachman—Monitor staff

Concord Monitor education reporter Jeremy Margolis (right) spoke with Concord High School students (from left) Kyla Ngu, Veronica Galdieri, Aryn Bernardo and Stefan West on  June 13 to get their thoughts on phone usage in school.

Concord Monitor education reporter Jeremy Margolis (right) spoke with Concord High School students (from left) Kyla Ngu, Veronica Galdieri, Aryn Bernardo and Stefan West on June 13 to get their thoughts on phone usage in school. Rachel Wachman / Monitor staff

By JEREMY MARGOLIS

Monitor staff

Published: 06-27-2025 1:42 PM

Modified: 06-27-2025 3:13 PM


The bell-to-bell ban on cellphones in schools that Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed into law Friday will bring about the biggest educational change in New Hampshire since the pandemic shutdown.

In a new series called Disconnected, the Concord Monitor will host conversations with groups of students, parents, teachers, and school administrators in the coming weeks about phone use in schools and the ramifications of the incoming phone ban.

In our first conversation, we sit down with four rising juniors and seniors at Concord High School.

The students were clear-eyed about the negative effects of their phone use and most of them believed their high school should adopt a stricter policy than they currently enforce. But they were  deeply skeptical about a bell-to-bell ban, which would also prohibit phone use during other portions of the day, including at lunch and during passing periods.

One student predicted the lack of phones during lunch would increase disruptions. All students were confident that classmates would flout an all-day ban by bringing in two phones.

Their recommendation for administrators and school boards: If you have to implement a bell-to-bell ban, make it as lenient as the new law allows.

This conversation took place on June 13, before the ban had become law. It has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

How would you describe your relationship to your phone?

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

Aryn Bernardo is a rising senior and a student representative to the Concord Board of Education. She said she uses her phone the most for TikTok, Instagram and texting.

ARYN: I know that I do not have a healthy relationship with my phone. I’m fairly addicted to it, which is really sad, but I’m trying to get better at it and trying not to consume as much social media – especially when it comes to body image or comparing myself to others.

Stefan West is a rising senior who previously attended a school in Morocco with a bell-to-bell school phone ban. He said he uses his phone the most for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

STEFAN: I don’t think it’s really possible to have a positive relationship with your phone in regards to education just because it’s always going to take away from time that you could be spending doing homework or something more productive. I do use social media the most and it does negatively impact my health and learning experience.

Veronica Galdieri is a rising senior and a member of Concord High’s robotics team. She said she uses her phone the most for Instagram, YouTube and Spotify.

VERONICA: I think my relationship’s a little bit weirder. I have an Instagram account, but that’s really my only social media. I have a lot of self-inflicted screen timer limitations on it. I try my hardest not to get pulled in, but it still happens occasionally.

How do you interact with your phones?

Kyla Ngu is a rising junior and a member of Concord High’s lacrosse team. She said she uses her phone the most for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify.

KYLA: For Instagram, I mostly use it to keep in contact with long distance friends and a lot of family members. I do want to become less dependent on it, but at the same time, if I delete some of those apps it feels like I’m just cutting them off completely.

ARYN: It’s mostly the scrolling of short videos – basically doomscrolling where you’re watching like a 15-second video clip. It’s really bad for your attention span according to research, but it can get very addicting.

Do you feel like you could have an active social life at Concord High School if you stayed off of all social media?

VERONICA: Even though I have the social media apps, I think there’s a lot of the social media culture that I don’t really participate in. So, honestly, I don’t think it would make that much of a difference for me.

STEFAN: I think that a lot of humor and culture at this school does revolve around social-media-created trends and everything. So it is a little bit harder to maybe fit in if you don’t have any social media at all. It is possible, but it does sort of remove this connectedness that you have with other people who watch similar stuff.

Give me an example of that. What does social media culture look like here?

ARYN: So there’s a lot of videos – like “brain rot” videos – that they have and they have a bunch of these terms – like “sigma” or “alpha” – a lot of really silly terms that they use, and a lot of kids just incorporate that into their everyday vocab as filler words. I do that occasionally as well.

Give me an example of a sentence with one of those words.

ARYN: [laughter] “What the sigma?” I say that to my teachers sometimes because I’m not going to swear in front of them. But I go like, “Oh, what the sigma is this?” They obviously hear, but they decide to ignore it because I’m saying random stuff.

STEFAN: Social media has created this environment where it’s such a fast-moving trend that if you don’t catch on within a week, there’s pretty much a new trend already and that one’s not as funny anymore. It’s really a bunch of micro-trends that build up over time and I just notice that the people who are less engaged with social media – to some people at least, not really to me – they do appear as outcasts, I would say.

VERONICA: Yeah, like when I was at camp last summer I had no access to my phone for two weeks. And I came back and Lizzo was canceled.

There’s been a lot of focus recently on how social media affects teenage mental health, particularly for young women. How do you think about the negative effects of social media when it comes to your mental health?

ARYN: A lot of social media, especially like TikTok and Instagram, you’re going to be seeing pictures of people highlighting the best moments of their life. So obviously you’re going to compare yourself to those moments and say, “Oh, I’m not living my life like how they are at this moment.”

VERONICA: I think I had a lot harder time dealing with that type of thing when I was 12, 13 and just starting to access social media. It’s definitely not a problem that goes away once you hit 17, but I feel like younger teen girls are a lot more vulnerable and feel a lot more of the pressure to fit in.

ARYN: A lot of them are going to these makeup stores and buying makeup and ruining their skin because they see that their favorite content creators or their favorite people on Instagram or TikTok are doing these certain things and they want to fit in.

STEFAN: Just from the perspective of what guys see online, the most problematic trend in social media right now is the pursuit of looking really good and prioritizing that over almost anything else in life. And I do see that in people my age.

And just to be clear, you’re seeing this behavior not just from influencers online but also from your peers?

STEFAN: Yeah, definitely. Like that’s probably the first thing that most people either tell me about themselves or sometimes even others when I talk to them. They say, “Oh, I’m not looking good today.” Like they don’t greet me normally. They’ll just talk about their looks first.

Let’s focus on phone use during school. How do you use your phone during the school day?

VERONICA: I’d say the vast majority of my usage of my phone during the school day is just listening to music.

STEFAN: There are a few times when I would use it for actual school things. There was one time I forgot my Chromebook – I did an assignment on my phone. Or if I have, for example, a dissection in a science class, I’ll take pictures with my phone. But besides that, it’s usually just I end up playing a game on my phone with my friends at lunch or in a class that doesn’t have any work to do.

ARYN: I mostly text my family and friends throughout the school day to keep my family updated about what’s going on. And then also, if there’s any downtime sometimes I scroll on social media and stuff like that.

KYLA: When I have a lot of independent work, I do use it as a second monitor while pulling up sources. I also use it to communicate with my parents or get a hold of my friends, but I typically don’t really find myself using it during active class time.

Do you think the current phone policy works well or not? [Concord High’s official policy requires that phones be placed in students’ bags or classroom door pockets during class, but the students said enforcement varies widely among teachers. The school allows students to use their phones outside of class freely.]

VERONICA: I feel like for me it works fine how it is right now, but I’ve definitely observed people on their phones in class when they’re not supposed to be. I think it kind of varies with the type of student you are – whether it’s actually impacting your learning or not.

STEFAN: I think the biggest thing about phones here is just that obviously teachers hate it because there’s less attention towards them which they do deserve and need. But also it’s definitely taking away from the immersed experience in a class. It’s never really been that helpful to have phones in the class and I think that it is necessary that we kind of move away from having them so integrated with education.

What do you think of the possibility of a bell-to-bell ban?

ARYN: Personally, I like it when we don’t have our phones in class, but I wouldn’t want it to be throughout the entire school day. There’s some kids who genuinely have anxiety when they don’t have their parents to rely on and they actually need to text them.

KYLA: We’ve had gun-related issues. There was a gun-like shooting threat that we recently had and it gave my parents a lot of relief to be able to immediately contact me on my phone.

VERONICA: Yeah, I don’t really feel like there’s any real benefit to not allowing them during passing periods and lunch because I feel like then you get to the point where you start to remove the things that are just kind of a blanket good with the phones, like being able to coordinate with parents about after school plans.

STEFAN: I know Gov. Kelly Ayotte has brought up socializing and I think that phones definitely do take away from it. I sit at lunch and everyone’s on their phone. But at the same time, I think it’s a very hard issue to deal with because there’s definitely something to be said for when kids are more bored in school and they don’t have the ability to just sort of sit on their phone at lunch, I would expect there to be more fighting or verbal instigation.

KYLA: For sports, I found that it was really essential for communication between me and my teammates and me and my coach because the weather was really unpredictable during lacrosse season. So I found that I was actually checking my phone a lot to speak with my teammates because we communicated on Snapchat.

If a bell-to-bell ban does get implemented, what’s your prediction for how it will play out?

VERONICA: I foresee that there’s going to be a lot of logistical issues that I think everyone’s going to be very unhappy about. I don’t think administrators are going to be happy about it either. Even if it does end up being a good thing in the long run, I think it’s just going to be rough.

STEFAN: Yeah, I think that initial switch is hard because you go from having a really phone-based environment to nothing at all. I think it really does change how kids will interact because it’ll be sort of strange to just be sitting at lunch and the really non-social kids are just talking with each other or at least just sitting there. And it might be pretty awkward at first. Bathroom visits to use your phone will go up too.

My understanding is you’re not even going to be able to access your phone when you go to the bathroom.

STEFAN: Yeah, well I mean kids will hide it. That’s usually what they do.

So you think people will bring two phones – a burner phone and their real phone?

All students in unison: Yeah, 100%.

VERONICA: I think people are going to do everything they can to still have access to their phone.

KYLA: I feel over-regulation is just going to create sneakier kids. There’s people that already bring their own computers that have unlimited access to everything. And there’s people who already found loopholes in our own school Chromebooks for games and videos.

STEFAN: It is a pretty strict policy for a school that’s so usually lenient and I think this shift is really going to catch a lot of students off guard. Education always is like a pendulum swing: it goes lenient to strict. And I think eventually, over the next 10 years, this will probably shift back to some sort of less strict phone policy.

Do you have any advice for your administrators or the school board if they are tasked with implementing the specifics of a bell-to-bell ban policy?

VERONICA: I would really lean towards a policy that makes it that you’re allowed to have your phone. It just can’t be visible. I think doing something like that would have a lot less pushback from students.

If you are a parent, teacher, or school administrator who would like to participate in a similar focus-group style conversation this summer, please email reporter Jeremy Margolis at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.