KALONA

In August, at the start of the 2024-2025 school year, Hillcrest Academy announced it would go phone-free, all day every day, as part of a new mental health initiative.

“The goal of this initiative aims to promote mindfulness, reduce distractions, and encourage meaningful connections among our students,” the school said in a press release. “We believe that by creating a personal device free space, our students can better focus on their studies, engage in healthy conversations, and develop essential life skills around phones and access to social media.”

Now, as the fall semester comes to an end, the school can take a step back and evaluate. Did going phone-free achieve the hoped-for outcomes?

As might be expected, the answer to that question is somewhat ambiguous.

The phone-free shift

Phone-free policies in schools have been gaining traction in recent years.

Between 2016 and 2020, the number of children 3-17 diagnosed with depression increased by 27%; those diagnosed with anxiety increased by 29%. Some point to social media and cellphone use as salient factors.

In May 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, urged congress to develop health and safety standards for technology platforms. In March 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” was released. School administrators started wondering what role they should play in changing students’ relationships with technology.

A handful of states have legislation on the books that restrict or ban students’ cellphone use at school. Iowa is not one of them, leaving it up to schools to make that call for themselves. Several, including Ankeny CSD and Ottumwa CSD, have at least banned cellphones from classrooms and hallways.

Hillcrest’s progression

Although Hillcrest’s ban may seem sudden from the outside, cellphones have been restricted on campus for the last five or six years. The cafeteria has been a phone-free zone so that students would focus on eating and socializing. The auditorium also has been phone-free. Individual teachers would collect phones from students during class time as they thought appropriate, but there was no universal policy.

Today, every student in the middle/high school is required to check-in their phone upon entry to their homeroom. Each of the homerooms have their own plastic box; inside are individual cases labeled with the 165 students’ names.

Throughout the day the phones are stored in the office, where office manager Amy Tackaberry can hear every alarm and ping. When leaving for the day, students can check-out their phones.

Students and parents weren’t blindsided by the more restrictive policy; in Spring 2024 a committee formed to explore the idea, and during the summer Hillcrest held open sessions where the community could come, ask questions, and learn about the phone-free initiative. An informational page was added to the school’s website so that everyone had access to the reasoning behind it.

Mid-year evaluation

So, three months in, how is the phone-free policy working out?

Overall, faculty are pleased with how the initiative was presented to students and parents, and how both groups bought in. Showing students that they could enjoy school without their phones was intended as a gift of love, school counselor Tom Carey says, and it seems to have been understood that way.

“I’m so proud of our students and how they have not been difficult,” he says. “They’ve been very cooperative overall, and I am so appreciative.”

Principal Dwight Gingerich agrees; “I feel like it’s been really good overall for our school,” he says. “It feels like there’s more energy and joy in the halls.”

Benefit 1: social time

Hillcrest anticipated eight key benefits to going phone-free. Although a single semester is not enough time to make conclusive judgements, so far, the most noticeable benefit has been students spending more time socializing with each other.

“I think we see our students mingling, talking, engaging each other much more than in the past,” Gingerich says. “It’s great to see them involved with ping pong or other board games or just chatting with each other in the library or putting puzzles together. All those things feel good to all of us.”

Carey, who is now into his second year at Hillcrest, has been able to make a 1:1 comparison between last year and 2024-25. He agrees with Gingerich.

“I’ve noticed students just really jumping into activities and being around each other and more interactive,” he says. “I didn’t think it was bad last year, but I feel like it’s better this year.”

High school math teacher Nate Miller has noted students more engaged with each other and other activities as well.

“I see kids in homeroom and during lunch and before school and after school, and between classes, and it seems like there’s a lot of social interaction,” he says. “There’s not kids sitting by themselves scrolling through their phones like there has been in the past.”

Benefit 2: classroom engagement

Another expected benefit was increased classroom engagement and increased success in classes.

Here things become a little murky. Whereas teachers notice students are no longer distracted by phones, there is no data to show they are earning higher grades – the marker by which we generally gauge success. In fact, even if students’ grades – or standardized test scores – did rise, it would be difficult to know if phone-free conditions were a contributing factor.

“There’s a lot of factors that could move the needle,” Carey says.

However, it does appear that students are less distracted when they’re in the classroom, which is certainly a precondition to being able to focus, engage, and learn.

“I think that when students aren’t able to fully be present in the class because they have a notification on their phone, that’s a problem,” Gingerich says. “Research says that it takes 20 minutes to reset after you get a notification. . . You’re not really ever fully present during a school day if you’re constantly getting notifications. Your mind is always on something else.”

“I think our teachers would say that our students are more present in the classroom,” he says, now that the school is phone-free.

At a minimum, teachers no longer need to stop class over phone-related issues.

“It just seems like I never have to address it in class, like tell the kids to put the phone away, so I think that’s better from a teacher perspective,” Miller says.

Benefit 3: mental health

Overall, the top-tier benefit Hillcrest hoped for was improved overall mental health. Counselor Carey may be in the best position to assess this as he talks with students daily about mental health issues, and he feels this is likely occurring, but admits he doesn’t have any hard data to back up his impression.

“One [student] asked me [about this] for her research paper. She said, ‘Tom, do you think mental health is better here since we got rid of the phones?’ and I was like, I would be curious to know what kids think, but I feel like it is,” he said.

“I’ve noticed anecdotally that, of course, we have lots of situations with students all the time where they’re going through a lot of emotional distress, but I feel like the severity, anecdotally, has been less,” he says. “It’s been less frequent, and there haven’t been as many severe situations as we’ve had. . . Kids have emotional distress, for sure. It’s part of the teenage years, and [going phone-free] isn’t going to take it away, but it helps us combat it better, frame it in a healthier way.”

Carey is optimistic, but also realistic about what a phone-free school can accomplish when it comes to mental health.

“It’s never going to be perfect. You can’t just take away phones and everybody’s better,” he says. “But I feel like it’s better this year. There could be other factors at play, but I think [going] phone-free is a part of it.”

Forging ahead

Of course, the transition to a phone-free school hasn’t been all smooth sailing. The human mind is adept at finding workarounds when there’s something it wants, and the students at Hillcrest are no different. They had been allowed to keep phones in their cars, but this policy was changed recently, as a few of those “in my car” phones showed up inside the school. Students also use Chromebooks for email and internet access, which can fill the void left by not having their phones.

“That’s something we’ve needed to work through, too,” Gingerich says. “We don’t want to just trade one for the other.”

Time will tell whether going phone-free during the school day will have a lasting positive effect on the lives of Hillcrest Academy’s faculty, staff, and students. At this early stage, however, the outlook is optimistic.