By admin 
How do you craft a cellphone policy in a school district of 19 students, where about half have their own device?
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As the superintendent of Colorado’s smallest district, Kim School District in southeastern Colorado, Chris Locke answered the question with a new policy that requires all students to keep phones tucked away in their lockers or backpacks from the time they step into school until the last class bell. Unless teachers want kids to use their smartphones as learning tools — to track time with a stopwatch, for instance, or to answer questions through a QR code while reviewing what they’ve already learned — phones must be out of sight, even if they’re not fully out of mind.
That includes lunch, when some students tend to whip out their phones and ignore everyone around them, Locke said, siloing kids sitting mere feet from each other.
“Even adults, it can isolate people where they’re not paying attention to anyone else,” Locke said.
His district’s restrictions are one approach to a new state law requiring all Colorado school districts and charter schools to develop a policy on when and how students can access smart devices during the school day. Alarmed by the ways technology and social media can interfere with student learning — from games and endless notifications to distracting group texts with friends — state lawmakers wanted to step in and allow districts to limit how much devices monopolize kids’ attention while in school.
“It felt like a game of Whac-A-Mole trying to just constantly take cellphones, especially as a high school teacher where a day could go by and we could see 150 kids in a day and we may have taken their phone yesterday but they have it back today,” said state Rep. Meghan Lukens, a Steamboat Springs Democrat and sponsor of House Bill 1135 who taught social studies until joining the House in 2023. “To a certain extent, teachers, parents and students just don’t stand a chance when these systems are designed to be addictive.”
Kids and teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media have double the risk of struggling with mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, according to research highlighted by the Office of the Surgeon General. That’s especially worrisome when teens are pouring a daily average of three-and-a-half hours into social media and many say social media harms their body image.
The new law, which requires all districts and charter schools to have a policy ready to go by July 1, keeps local control in mind.
In deciding upon the details of their own policies, many district leaders and school boards gathered input from students, parents and teachers, weighing different options: Is an all-out ban on cellphones in schools necessary? Should restrictions be tailored to different age groups? Should individual teachers take the reins and set their own classroom rules?
Getting ahead of the law
Locke, in the rural Kim School District, said cellphones haven’t disturbed student learning because his students, for the most part, are respectful and compliant. Everyone knows everyone in Kim, a prairie town of fewer than 100 residents in Las Animas County.
“The numbers and the attention that kids get, they’re not ever left unsupervised,” he said. “My senior kids know my preschoolers and will go in and shoot baskets with them. It’s like a family.”
Even so, district staff were talking about how to better monitor cellphones among students before legislation came before the legislature last year, Locke said. And now, the adults are also considering following the same rules they are about to start enforcing.
“We’ve even discussed as a staff if we are going to mandate this policy, that we also need to be responsible and put away our phones as a staff to model it,” Locke said. “If we are going to demand this of our students, we want to be the leaders and not be sitting in a class and just being on our phones.”
Just over 100 miles north of Kim, Karval School District staff began debating whether their district needed a standard set of rules dictating cellphone use about three years ago, Superintendent Sarah Nuss said. Following the new state law, the district — which educated a total of 26 students last year — settled on handing authority down to teachers to decide when students must put their phones away and when they can use their devices for research or to listen to music.
With class sizes of three to five students, Nuss describes the Lincoln County district environment as “a fishbowl” with nowhere for kids to hide should they attempt to sneak a peek at their phones.
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Most of her students don’t get their first cellphone until their sophomore year, Nuss said, so smart devices don’t regularly divert their attention.
In nailing down a policy, Nuss said she wanted teachers to have the most say and sway.
“As a district, our mantra has always been that we keep issues as close to the source as possible,” she said. “Our policy needs to comply with law, but the flavor of it needs to be that it starts in the classroom, it starts on an individual basis. One-size-fits-all never works, and especially in small systems like ours, adopting policies that make sense in urban settings can completely be useless in our setting. It has to be created by the people that are going to be enforcing it, who see usage, who have direct contact with students.”
Nuss, whose district covers a large land mass, said cellphones have become critical for older students to have on hand every day. Sometimes they are learning tools. Other times they are safety gadgets.
One of her students last year had to drive 55 miles one way to get to school.
“We knew we would need to be talking to students to coordinate transportation because things happen,” Nuss said. “Students can get stranded. Students can have flat tires. Things can happen with the huge distances we’re traveling, and so it’s a way of being really safe, too, because parents want to know that their kid arrived at the school safely if they’re traveling 50 miles. We want to be able to communicate with parents.”
The district has even created a communication app monitored by artificial intelligence so that students and teachers have a reliable way to communicate should a student be running late, needing to arrange transportation or touch base about events or fundraisers.
Big schools, big plans
Erin Kane, superintendent of the 61,500 students in Douglas County School District, also acknowledges the importance of high school students having access to cellphones because of the outsized role technology will play in their futures.
“I’m really glad this issue has garnered so much attention nationally and locally because it is a big issue and we do need to make sure that we are navigating the tension … between mitigating the negative impacts of technology on our vulnerable kids,” Kane said, “while also ensuring that we are preparing our kids to be successful for the future that they are going to step into, where technology is very much the reality.”
Many schools across the district have already been informally following the new policy, Kane said. In elementary and middle schools, students can bring their phones to school but must keep them silenced and stored all day. High schoolers, meanwhile, must silence their phones and stash them during class time, but they are permitted to scroll on their phones during passing periods and lunch time.
The policy the school landed on reflects what the community asked for, Kane said, noting the district spent a year and a half talking to parents, staff and students about how to police cellphones in school. Douglas County School District also conducted a survey among families and staff, combing through more than 3,800 responses.
Most families and staff members leaned toward “restricted use” of devices for high school students rather than a complete ban, Kane said.
“The truth is our kids have to learn how to use these devices responsibly and they’re occasionally used in class by teachers for educational purposes,” she said. “The kids need to learn how to navigate the constant distraction.
“Elementary and middle school kids, the constant distraction is incredibly destructive, but high school students, they still have devices … and so we need to help them navigate those devices responsibly and in a way that supports their education and isn’t destructive.”
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