Each morning, students at Martin Luther King Middle School in Richmond, Virginia, begin their day with a lesson in restraint — by handing in their phones.
“I’m not worried about the notifications I’m getting and who’s texting me or what’s going on on social media,” 8th grader Jazmine Anderson said.
The school began piloting a program last year to lock up cellphones in special pouches made by the company Yondr and store them in a supervised backpack. When the school first started using the locked pouches, they’d let students hold onto them. But that didn’t quite work, 8th grade English teacher Jasmine Armistead said.
“They were always messing with the pouch, trying to open it, trying to break in it, because again, they’re teenagers,” Armistead said.
Nearly all U.S. teens (95%) have access to a smartphone, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey.
A 2023 Common Sense Media report found that about 1 in 5 of the teens surveyed receive 500 or more notifications per day, many of which come during school hours. About 97% of survey participants used their phones for a median of 43 minutes during school hours, which is roughly the length of a class period.