Salem-Keizer School District leaders are considering stricter measures to ban cellphones during class as some schools plan to step up enforcement of a no-phones policy during the upcoming school year.
Sprague High School is the latest to issue a schoolwide policy saying phones and earbuds won’t be allowed during class. Principal Chad Barkes made the announcement in a summer message to families.
District leaders in the summer of 2022 issued a policy banning phones during class time for all middle and high school students. The policy was made to set clear expectations following the pandemic return to in-person classes.
“We really want students to be engaged,” said Larry Ramirez, the district’s high school director.
Under that policy, students can use phones during passing periods, lunch and before and after school. During class, parents who want to reach their students urgently should call the school office.
Now, the district is seeking proposals from vendors for technology or products that would disable phones during the day without requiring schools to individually collect and redistribute phones.
That could include lockable phone pouches which have quickly gained ground in schools across the U.S. District spokesman Aaron Harada said the district doesn’t have specific plans to move forward with any technology or an outline for which grades or schools they’d potentially begin with.
The goal of seeking bids is “to see what is out there, what is possible and potential costs,” he said.
Before the pandemic, individual teachers had been able to set policies in their own classrooms. The uniform district approach in 2022 came after educators asked for help setting a clear standard as kids who were used to having unfettered access to phones during online school returned to the classroom, said Tyler Scialo-Lakeberg, Salem-Keizer Education Association president.
Prior to holding a union leadership job, Scialo-Lakeberg taught at North Salem High School. She said phones have been a distraction in class since they became widespread. But when she taught classes as a substitute following the pandemic, the distraction had worsened significantly. Students were openly watching YouTube videos in class without headphones, she said.
“It needs to be kind of a cold turkey in our schools because they’re disrupting,” she said.
Cellphone bans have emerged as a major education policy issue over the last year, with several states passing laws to crack down on phone use. Gov. Tina Kotek said earlier this year she supports a statewide policy on phones in class. A bipartisan group of legislators is working on a bill for the 2025 session.
Aside from posing a classroom distraction, educators have cited cyberbullying, student mental health and students filming fights as reasons to limit phone use during the school day.
In Salem schools, despite the district wide policy, enforcement and expectations have varied school to school, educators and students say.
“We have to continue to restate that expectation,” Ramirez said.
West Salem High School began enforcing a strict cellphone ban last school year, principal Carlos Ruiz said. He said policies were inconsistent between classrooms, which led to battles where students would try to persuade teachers to allow phones in one class because another teacher allowed them.
“We wanted to have consistency so we could minimize distractions,” he said. Despite worries about the policy, students told him after implementation that it wasn’t as bad as they’d feared.
West’s policy is strict and requires students to trade their phone to get a bathroom pass “in order to ensure that students don’t leave class for extended periods of time and use their cell phones in the restroom.”
Ruiz said the school still lets teachers allow phones in class for educational purposes, and individual students who need phones for disability accommodations can use them. But the need for phones in class has been reduced because the district purchased Chromebooks for every student during the pandemic.
Barkes said his announcement for Sprague means the school will begin enforcing the district policy. He said the decision came after feedback from teachers, a student advisory committee and other district high schools.
“We had posted this as an expectation; however our enforcement of the policy was not as strict as the policy stated,” Barkes said in an email.
Sofia Castellanos, student adviser to the Salem-Keizer School Board, said she understands the reasons for strict phone bans. But she said she would rather have teachers require that students be focused on schoolwork, whether they’re using phones or not.
Castellanos will be a senior at South Salem High School and is in the school’s International Baccalaureate program, a demanding slate of college-level courses. She said teachers in the program have generally allowed students to use phones and headphones in class for research, or to listen to music or white noise while they’re working.
An approach focused on productivity “makes students feel like they’re heard and they have a choice.”
She often listens to background noise on Spotify so she isn’t distracted by sounds in the classroom like people coughing or shuffling their feet while she’s studying.
“It’s just easier to focus when you can have more control of your environment,” she said.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
