The district’s board of education adopted a no-cellphone policy last year, but has allowed each school to draft campus-specific policies. Ecker Hill Middle School students must keep their phones in their backpacks and Treasure Mountain Junior High students must keep their phones in magnetically locked pouches all day.
Park City High School didn’t draft a policy, instead leaving it up to each teacher.
A new state law also bans smartphones, smartwatches and other “emerging technology” during class. School districts will still have the authority to allow student use of smart devices during classroom hours, as long as they create policies to do so.
Superintendent Lyndsay Hunstman said the district is now working to come up with an age-appropriate cellphone policy for high schoolers to comply with district and legislative policies.
Treasure Mountain ninth-grade teachers Scot Myers, Susie Cox, Daniel Mendiola and Jenna Monson shared their thoughts on the school’s policy and whether to translate it to the high school. All four will be among the teachers and ninth-grade students moving to Park City High in the fall after Treasure Mountain closes this summer.
The teachers said the locked pouch system helped reduce problems in class.
Myers, who teaches English, said he used to use a phone pouch holder that hangs on the wall, but faced issues with students putting fake phones in the pouch or slyly taking their phones out of the holder when going to the restroom. He often had to take students to the office for using phones during class
“I felt like the phone police,” he said. “This year I'd maybe collected maybe three phones the entire year. It's been like night and day for me.”
They also said a big positive of the locking pouch system is that every teacher uses it and there are uniform consequences. On a first offense for using a phone in school, teachers hand the device to the main office. The main office then documents the policy violation and informs the student’s parent or guardian. The student can reclaim their phone at the end of the day.
The process is the same for a second violation, but a parent or guardian must pick up the device. For all subsequent offenses, school administrators will meet with students and parents or guardians to discuss how best to move forward.
Mendiola, who teaches Spanish, said if it were up to him, the high school would use this same system.
“I don't have to argue with kids like, ‘Well, this teacher lets me do this, and this teacher does this.’ I like it being uniform, it's the expectation, and that's what we're going to follow,” he said.
Monson, who teaches math, said she’d like some flexibility as sometimes it’s helpful to have students do quick quizzes on their phones. However, she has noticed the social benefit of having no phones in the school. Monsoon said the students are kinder.
“I'm not dealing with the bullying stuff that I saw last year, like on the daily basis,” she said.
Monsoon said she asked five of her students for their thoughts on the locking pouches and all five said they liked them.
“All of them said that they actually like not having to, like, control that urge as much,” she said. “Even if they're not locking their phone in the pouch, they know that they're not supposed to be on it and they know that this is a limited tech time, and they’re ok with for the most part.”
Cox, who teaches computer science, said education about cellphones should be included, whatever the policy is. She said students need to learn to manage their time when a cellphone is around.
“Ideal world: we have a class that the kids can take, or part of a class the kids can take, where we talk about what's going on with your brain developmentally, and why the phone is such a powerful influencer at that specific age and time of development.”
The 14 parents in the audience had mixed feelings about what the high school’s cellphone policy should be. Event organizer Holland Lincoln and parent Brian George both prefer a device ban during school hours.
Another parent said her child likes the hanging phone holders instead and noted this method would be cheaper.
High school and district administrators have until fall to determine what the cellphone policy will be. Huntsman said it could involve different rules for each grade level.
Huntsman said the district will try to organize another community discussion in May.
