Leaders at Portland Public Schools are zeroing in on a districtwide cellphone policy, but prospects are dimming that they will purchase locking pouches for all middle and high school students.
The pouches, made by a company called Yondr, are being piloted by two of the district’s high schools and one of its middle schools this year and are being used universally for sixth to 12th grade students in a handful of other Oregon school districts, including North Clackamas.
Under that system, students are required to put their phones into a locking pouch at the start of the school day, where it remains until it can be unlocked after the last bell. That means students have no access to a phone even during lunch or passing periods.
In Portland, district staff recommended at a school board policy meeting this week that the district require students to keep phones “off and away” in all classrooms, paired with standardized disciplinary policies that could include confiscation of devices. They also recommended that high school students have access to their phones during lunch, but several school board members said they thought phones should be off limits all day for middle schoolers.
Under the draft policy, principals would have the authority to implement stricter rules around phone use at their school or to allow limited use in courses like journalism, where students may use them to record interviews and take photos or videos. Students whose individualized education plans specify phone access would be still able to use their devices.
The recommendation, which several school board members have said they are inclined to support, comes after a survey of 2,147 – or 15% – of the district’s high schoolers found that they overwhelmingly want access to their phones during lunch. Students said they want to be able to check in with friends and family and have their phones for safety reasons, especially when venturing off campus for lunch.
Portland Public Schools sent a survey to all of its high school students about device use, and more than 2,100 of them responded. As the above graphic reflects, students from each high school in the district were asked whether their schools had a uniform policy on cellphone use, and whether it was applied across their classrooms. McDaniel High School, in Northeast Portland, was an outlier in the responses on school wide policy.Courtesy of Portland Public Schools
“Sometimes it does help students be focused in class,” conceded Lovely Castillo-Bojorquez, an eighth grader at Beaumont Middle School, where Yondr pouches were distributed to all students this year. But she said the pouches have their limits: “If I am honest, most of my classmates at school do not use it. We leave it in our lockers. It feels like it was a lot of money that could have been used in other places.”
The North Clackamas School District spent $300,000 on the cellphone disabling pouches this year. It has around 8,000 sixth to 12th grade students. Portland has more than 20,000.
Castillo-Bojorquez said she thinks there are times when phones can be helpful tools. The ability to listen to music during in-class assignments helps her concentrate and block out distractions, she said. And during emergencies like lockdowns, students want to be able to contact their parents, she said — though district officials in North Clackamas and elsewhere have said that risks jamming cell signals and spreading misinformation.
She said students would respond best to a compromise plan, “like putting it in our lockers and then if they see it on us, they could immediately take it.” That’s happened already this year to students she knows, Castillo-Bojorquez said, and they’ve been sent to the principal’s office, which she said was enough to deter other students from following suit.
Technically, Portland schools already have off-and-away policies on the books, meaning students are expected to stow their devices in their backpacks, pockets or lockers. And many classrooms have storage devices for student phones, like lockboxes or repurposed shoe caddies. But enforcement has largely been left to individual teachers until this year, leading to a patchwork of outcomes and consequences.
“What we heard loud and clear from students is that at the classroom level, expectations were not consistent,” said Renard Adams, director of research, accountability and assessment at Portland Public Schools. “There were certainly classes where they could use their devices, and where they could not. What came through loud and clear was the idea that if there is a policy that says there are restrictions to personal device usage, students want that policy to be enforced consistently, so that expectations are clear.”
Several school board members, including Chair Eddie Wang, Vice Chair Michelle DePass and member Patte Sullivan, said they’d prefer a rule that bans cellphone use throughout the school day, even at lunch and in passing periods. Wang, a former teacher, said he was concerned that an off-and-away policy, in which students could be allowed to stow their phones in their backpacks, would lead to long “bathroom breaks” during class in which students were on their phones. That could leave teachers in the difficult position of having to interrogate their students about their restroom use, he said.
Wang also noted that feedback from principals, especially from middle schools, has been that fights and bullying peak during lunch and recess, which can be exacerbated by phone use. He and a majority of the school board said middle school students should have to abide by the off-and-away policy all day, possibly by being required to leave phones in lockers.
But school board members Gary Hollands and Julia Brim-Edwards, said that an all day off-and-away policy for high schoolers presented enforcement issues at lunch in particular, since some students leave campus.
The locking pouches are one potential way to address that issue and ensure that students’ devices stay off-limits all day long, even during lunch. But Brim-Edwards, at least, said she was wary of any blanket requirements.
“I am not willing to mandate one particular tool for enforcement, and one that costs us resources,” she said. “I don’t know that it is actually needed.”
— Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at [email protected]. Follow her on X.com at @jrlsilverman.
