Our quest for an "away for the day" middle school
Here's exactly what I emailed our principal, and her response
Happy news in our corner of the world: a ripple of support for “away for the day” phone policies seems to be moving across the nation. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, recently voted to ban phones during the day. New York City has signaled that it may pass a similar ban soon, and the governor of our neighbors to the north has just issued an executive order to the same effect — to name but a few prominent examples.
This is exciting, and a cause for great hope for those of us who would like to delay our kids’ access to smartphones and social media, repair the play-based childhood, and reestablish schools as a place for learning and face-to-face friendship. Because while I believe individual families making the choice to delay smartphones and social media is powerful and important, the fact remains that it’s a hard, isolating road if all a kid’s peers have phones and are constantly on them — including during the school day. School phone bans can do so much to turn the tide of earlier-onset phone adoption.1
And of course, that’s aside from the academic and societal reasons for banning phones in schools, which Jonathan Haidt has done a thorough job of laying out in his book The Anxious Generation and more succinctly in this post on
.Unsurprisingly, a phone-free middle school is something that’s important to me and John, and something I think about a lot even though our oldest is only a rising third grader. I know many of you feel the same way. In the hopes that it might be helpful, here’s what we’ve done so far to try and move the needle…