With 95 percent of U.S. teens reporting having access to personal smartphone devices, administrators and teachers in Archuleta School District (ASD) are continuing to discuss what role, if any, those devices should play during the school day.
In a January study published by the Pew Research Center, nearly all of the nation’s teens reported using smartphones — most of which come equipped with a bevy of applications engineered for entertainment and engagement.
Oftentimes, that engagement is taking place during school hours.
Reviewing ASD’s cellphone use policy at its Oct. 14 meeting, ASD Board of Education members grappled with the varying approaches to enforcing the policy within the district itself.
In its current form, the general policy acknowledges “personal technology devices” can be potentially useful tools in educational settings, but leaves schools to regulate their usage.
At Pagosa Springs Middle School, for example, cellphone use during the hours of 8 a.m. and 3:25 p.m. is not allowed, while the high school asks teachers to enforce their own rules around cellphone use during instructional time.
“The high school has the most flexibility, where it’s simply saying, teachers, you know your content, you know what you’re teaching, you can figure out how much is enough,” ASD superintendent Rick Holt said, summarizing the high school’s individualized enforcement approach.
For Darcy DeGuise, an English teacher at the high school, the battle for her students’ attention is a daily one — and the competition is stiff.
“I can’t compete with a three-minute Tik Tok video,” DeGuise reported to the board on Nov. 12.
“As effervescent and engaging as I might be, I cannot compete with someone who is demure or nonchalant,” she added with a chuckle, referring to recent social media trends and the smorgasbord of content luring student attention away.
It’s not for lack of trying, she noted, but according to DeGuise, what’s lost in efforts to curb student cellphone use is valuable instructional time.
“I find that it is a huge time suck,” she said. “It is a fight every single day to get them to put their cellphones up, to put [them] in a cellphone pocket.”
A more comprehensive, school-wide policy regarding the use of smartphones in the high school’s classrooms would be supportive of other teachers facing similar challenges, DeGuise suggested.
“I think that it would be something worth considering and worth continuing to discuss, and not just leave it up to individual teachers, because it is a burden,” she said.
Research indicates DeGuise is not alone.
According to a fall 2023 survey, also conducted by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of U.S. high school teachers said cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom, compared with 33 percent of middle school teachers and 6 percent of elementary school teachers.
In that survey, high school teachers were the least likely to say their school district has policies regarding student use of cellphones in the classroom, and, of those with a policy, high school teachers were the most likely to say the policies are difficult to enforce.
According to Holt, regulating young people’s relationship with their phones is an undertaking fraught with complexities that, to be effective, likely needs to extend beyond the school day.
“We are dealing with kids who are up reading uncontrollable content without parental supervision, who come in with wild ideas about what life is like out in the world and what it means to be attractive, or what it means to be successful,” Holt said. “We’re trying to manage that situation as best we can.
“[This] is a problem for our community, and it is so massive, it sometimes makes me a little nauseous trying to figure out how would we resolve that. How do we do it? I do think it’s through a long educational campaign, much the way that society fought big tobacco. That’s what it’s going to take.”
