Dixon, Rock Falls, Oregon schools strive to find balance amid nationwide cellphone ban debate

DIXON – Should students be allowed to use their cellphones in class? Should they be banned from the classroom altogether? Or is there a solution somewhere in the middle in which students can bring them into the classroom but agree not to use them?

It’s a debate that has stirred discussion nationwide.

Restrictions on cellphone use in schools have increased in the past year across the nation as phone use rises and studies indicate the negative effects of social media on youths. In a recent study, 77% of schools in the U.S. said they restrict cellphones outside of academic use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

And in the past year, 10 states including Indiana have passed legislation regarding cellphones in the classroom. States banning cellphones in the classroom include Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, while Alabama strongly encourages every school district to set a policy.

Educators who support a ban say it’s because they believe cellphones are distracting in a learning environment. But at the same time, parents against a full-on ban say it’s because they want their child to have access to their cellphone in case of an emergency.

Shaw Local News Network reached out to school districts in the Sauk Valley region to determine what their cellphone policies are and whether there is any chance of a change to policies because of the current debate.

What are the local policies?

Students at Rock Falls High School, Dixon High School and Oregon Junior/Senior High School are not allowed to use their cellphones in the classroom, but they can use them during passing periods and at their lunch period. Notably, within the past two years, each school has come up with its own version of a phone hotel – a temporary storage method for cellphones – as a way to keep students off their phones during class.

Oregon introduced the no-cellphone policy during the 2022-23 school year and supplied each classroom with what the school calls “cellphone lockers” – a small cabinet with a lock and a handle – “so if there’s an emergency, the teacher can grab the whole locker,” Principal Heidi Deininger said in an interview with Shaw Local.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we recognized how much time kids were spending on their phones,” she said. “They’d become such a distraction.”

It’s up to each individual teacher whether the students store their phones in the locker but, either way, cellphones need to be out of sight during the class period, Deininger said.

Rock Falls has had its no phones in the classroom policy for a long time, but at the start of the 2023-24 school year, each classroom was supplied with what the school calls “cellphone cases” because “cellphones become a distraction from the learning environment,” Principal Mike Berentes said.

Although students aren’t required to store their phones in the case, it is recommended, Berentes said.

That same year, Dixon High School also increased its existing no phones in the classroom policy by supplying every classroom with “cellphone caddies,” which are organizers that hang on the wall with numbered pockets, Principal Jared Shaner said.

A storage solution

Unlike Oregon and Rock Falls, Dixon requires all students to store their phones in the caddies for the duration of each class period. At the beginning of the year, students are assigned a number that corresponds with the caddy, similar to a seating chart. When students enter the classroom, they put their phone into their assigned number slot, and when instruction is going on, their phones are in the caddy, Shaner said.

Before implementing the cellphone caddies, Shaner said, district administration researched its effectiveness and “found consistency is the key. So, if [students] are walking into English class, the expectation is the same as science class and social studies.”

Teachers can tell the students to put their cellphones away – in their pocket or in their book bag – but for teenagers, the temptation to pull it out is too much. There needs to be a physical distance between the student and their device, Shaner said.

“It’s in the same classroom. From any seat you can look up and see your phone. You just don’t have the ability to pull it out of your pocket in the middle of your teacher giving a lecture,” Shaner said.

“This whole controversy is not unlike what I’ve seen with earlier technology in schools. We had to deal with pagers and calculators, and now [there’s] cellphones.”

—  Skip Lee, retired Rock Falls High School teacher

This concept of teachers collecting students’ cellphones before class isn’t completely new. Skip Lee, who was a teacher at Rock Falls High School for 35 years before retiring in 2011, recalled that some teachers implemented a similar policy during the early days of smartphones, he said.

Lee recalled that when cellphones were becoming more common among teenagers, there were some teachers who were concerned about students being distracted by them during class. The teachers who had an issue with it got a “cubby” for their classroom and assigned each student a slot in which to store their phone during the class period, he said.

As a former teacher, “I think cellphones can be useful [in a classroom]. I could envision myself saying, ‘OK, kids, go to your phones and call up this website,’ but enough schools have the iPads now, so that wouldn’t be necessary,” Lee said.

When Rock Falls first introduced its no-phone policy, Berentes said, sometimes teachers would ask if they could have students use their phones to search something online, but now that each student has a computer, it’s no longer an issue.

At Oregon and Dixon, all students are issued Chromebooks to use during class for lessons or assignments.

Because of that, “they don’t really need the phones for anything else,” Deininger said.

At Dixon High School, the student and parent reaction to the cellphone caddies was overall positive, but “with anything in life, anytime there’s change, there’s always fear,” Shaner said.

The big thing that most people were concerned about was needing access to their cellphone in case of an emergency, he said.

The school assured parents that they would have access to their child during the day, reminding them that students still are able to use their phones during pass time and at their lunch period, Shaner said. He also pointed out that the school has phones in every classroom, so “if there was an emergency, we’d be able to communicate,” he said.

Rock Falls also got some mixed reactions to its cellphone policies, something Berentes described as a mixture of support and a lot of frustration.

In response to a survey by Shaw Local, Michelle Maxfield, a parent of school-aged children in Rock Falls, indicated that she was “strongly in favor” of a classroom ban on cellphones and wrote “they are on their cellphones way too much during school hours.”

Ryan Huels, a parent of school-aged children and also an administrator in Oregon School District 220, also responded to the survey and indicated that he supports a cellphone ban in classrooms because “they are a giant disruption to the learning environment.”

At Oregon, Deininger said the school administration has communicated with the parents so they know the policies.

“They do get their phones during lunch and pass time, so we tell [the students] every 45 minutes or so you can check your phone,” Deininger said.

Local successes

At Rock Falls High School, the cellphone cubbies worked well because “if there had been some sort of disaster, [the phones] are right there in the cubby,” Lee said.

“I think we’ve moved into a time where kids need to have access to their cellphones if there’s an emergency,” Lee said. “Whether it’s a school shooting or weather events, they need to have access.”

It was a solution that satisfied both sides of the argument: parents wanting their kids to have access and teachers who are trying to maintain their students’ attention, Lee said.

Since implementing the cellphone caddy policy last year, the number of Dixon High School students being sent to the office for using their phones during instructional time went down by 50%, Shaner said.

“I think our teachers would say our kids were more engaged when we started the cellphone caddy policy,” Shaner said.

However, he noted that there are so many other factors in a classroom that it’s difficult to say if the cellphone policy was the sole contributing factor to the students being more engaged.

At Oregon, student engagement and participation have increased over the past two years since implementing its cellphone policy, but – like Shaner said – it’s hard to tell if that’s a direct result of the classroom cellphone ban, Deininger said.

She noted that the biggest gain has been an improvement in the students’ ability to focus.

“They are able to stick to a task and complete it,” she said.

Lee has words of assurance for those on both sides of the debate.

“This whole controversy is not unlike what I’ve seen with earlier technology in schools,” Lee said, adding that everyone has had to adjust with each new technological advancement. “We had to deal with pagers and calculators, and now [there’s] cellphones.”