The Archuleta School District Board of Education indicated it would further consider a district-wide cellphone policy after hearing reports from teachers and students that personal phone use during class time is distracting, unsafe and damaging to relationships.
At the top of their meeting on Jan. 14, board members listened as educators shared experiences and perspectives from around the district, where policies concerning cellphone use differ from school to school and, sometimes, classroom to classroom.
“Why should we acquiesce to the pull of a distraction that, in my opinion, is keeping us all from realizing our students’ true potential?” asked Darcy DeGuise, an English teacher at Pagosa Springs High School (PSHS).
About one-third of Colorado’s largest school districts have adopted stricter cellphone policies in the last two years, according to an August 2024 Chalkbeat survey, with Boulder Valley the latest to do so.
But in many districts and schools, teachers are responsible for establishing and enforcing their own rules around student cellphone use during instruction time. That remains the approach at PSHS.
“The high school has the most flexibility,” said Superintendent Rick Holt during a November 2024 discussion about the same issue. “It’s simply saying, teachers, you know your content, you know what you’re teaching, you can figure out how much is enough.”
But according to Carrie Steadman, the gifted and talented coordinator for the district and a teacher at Pagosa Springs Middle School (PSMS), that approach involves “teachers encountering personal property of students and having that potentially go awry,” she said during the Jan. 14 meeting.
She added, “That can be damaging to relationships with students.”
Cellphone use is prohibited during the school day at PSMS, where teachers reported observing students who are less distracted and more engaged with learning — and one another — during class time.
“Students interact with each other directly, fostering social skills and building stronger relationships,” said fifth-grade teacher Amy Owen. “Overall, the middle school’s well-implemented no cellphone policy has created a more conducive learning environment for many students, and it’s very helpful as a teacher.”
Thomas Davenport, a math teacher at PSMS, agreed and tied the school’s cellphone policy to higher academic performance.
“I think it’s really made an academic difference on our campus,” he said. “We outmatched a lot of our regional peers last year, and I really feel that has something to do with a more distraction-free learning environment.”
In addition to those distractions, also alarming for educators like Alissa Shirk, a special education teacher at PSHS, are the risks of unfiltered adult content making its way to minors on school grounds.
“I walked into advisory and I saw a student on an explicit website,” Shirk said. “I’ve seen a lot of examples of egregious use of cellphones, and [students] are not paying their bills or looking at self-help articles like we do … they’re getting caught up in video games, texting people they might not even know, and it is a big concern.”
According to board members Amanda Schick and Butch Mackey, some students are concerned, too.
Describing a recent roundtable discussion with high schoolers at PSHS that covered a range of topics, Mackey recalled, “The students brought up the issue of cellphone usage. We didn’t bring it up. And they were uniformly in support of not having the phones available to them in class.”
Those students, Mackey reported, echoed many of the complaints noted by their teachers: that cellphone use in classrooms was distracting and enforcement is inconsistent.
“One of the concerns that they mentioned at the high school level is that a lot of the guidelines shall we say were teacher-specific, so it varied from class to class to class. They didn’t like that at all,” Mackey said.
Considering those remarks as well as ones made by the teachers present for the Jan. 14 meeting, board president Bob Lynch noted a “nexus” of feedback around the issue, with fellow board members signaling openness to holding further discussions.
“We need to have a conversation [about] what are we doing with the information that we are receiving, from multiple points,” said Schick. “What we are hearing from the staff, what we’re hearing from students and families.”
Mackey indicated he is reaching the point where he would be in support “of what’s been presented by the staff here and the students as well.”
Mackey earlier noted, “That’s something we probably need to continue to make some plans to address, probably sooner rather than later.”
