Students across Kansas are adapting to a new reality at school: no cell phones. It’s the first time many of them have had to go without a phone since elementary school.
And for some educators and students in Wichita, the change is going better than expected.
“I think my anticipation (was) this would be really difficult, and that we'd have a lot of difficult conversations with parents and students,” said Nathanel Harvey, assistant principal at Wichita South High School. “But for the most part, it's gone pretty well.”
Harvey said students seem to be more engaged with one another and not hiding away on their phones during lunch.
He said it’s also helped curb drama and fights that stem from social media, while providing students the opportunity to improve their face-to-face social skills.
“... Practicing some of those in -person skills, having conversations— it's meant we've had to do more coaching with: ‘Here's how we talk to people. Here's how we respond to negativity. Here's how we work with others,’” he said.
In the spring, Kansas lawmakers banned student cell phone use at all K-12 schools.
With little direction and no state funding for storage, school districts scrambled over the summer to figure out how to enforce the ban.
In Wichita, students are encouraged to leave their phones at home or in their cars. When students do bring them to school, each building has a slightly different approach.
An elementary school might ask students to leave their devices in a backpack or cubby at the back of the room. High schools might ask students to store their phones in student lockers, in the front office or a mix of the two.
East High, for example, asks students to turn in their phones at the front office and leave them there until dismissal.
Helen Veazey-Heying, a sophomore at East, said that process started out a bit rough at the district’s largest high school.
“There's like 2,500 kids, so obviously it's kind of hard to get the lines really moving right,” she said. “And the first day, it was really bad. We'd wait like 30 minutes to get your phone back at the end of the day.”
More than a month into the semester, though, she said that process has improved — as well as her outlook on the phone ban.
“When you're in high school, you see the new laws and you're like, ‘Do old people really understand that this is what's right?’” she said. “But then as I kind of went on and I figured out a routine and then a schedule for it, it got easier.”
A separate provision in the law bars teachers from directly messaging students.
East High junior Russell Uptmor said that’s created some challenges when the marching band travels.
“A solution that we'd come up with was, she would text one of the kid’s parents, the kid would then text our group leaders, and then our group leaders would text our group section group chats,” he said, “which takes a little bit longer to get to everybody.”
In the classroom, at least, some teachers say the statewide ban has lightened their workload when it comes to policing phones.
“In years prior, [students] would argue about turning it in or giving it to me, and I would have to find some sort of system, and then that would take up a lot of class time,” said Haley Craig, an English teacher at South. “But now I just fill out my slip of paper, I hand it to them, and they just go.”
Whitney Thomas, a sociology and government teacher at South, said the change forces students to collaborate more with one another.
“They don't just have a phone there where they can take a picture, put it in ChatGPT, and get all their answers,” she said. “Now they're having to actually work with somebody and figure out the answers together.”
And her favorite part of the new policy?
“I can just say, "Hey, this isn't me. This isn't South High,’” she said.
“‘This is the state of Kansas. This is a law.’”
