Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, April 28, 2024
I’d like to offer three practical steps for Dallas ISD schools to take to support our kids’ healthy development:
Technology audit
We have a huge school district. What’s on paper is unlikely to match what happens in every school or every classroom. There should be an independent, unannounced audit of our elementary, middle and high schools examining how much students use their smartphones during the day, in addition to an audit for how much of the day’s educational curriculum is spent on a screen of any kind. This is not to shame teachers but to actually get a pulse on how much screen time there is. For most parents, it’s a complete mystery, which my friend and reporter Jessica Grose pointed out in The New York Times and started surveying parents directly.
Playful recess
Schools should implement longer or multiple recesses; indoor recess should only occur when it’s physically dangerous to be outside. If the weather is truly inclement, there should be crafts-based activities or gym activities to facilitate free play and socialization.
Tablets or screens of any kind should not be provided for recess, full stop. As Haidt points out, the average American elementary school student gets only 27 minutes of recess a day. In maximum-security federal prisons in the U.S., inmates are guaranteed at least two hours of outdoor time.
No smartphones on campus
This last suggestion is the most significant. In 2023, Dallas ISD required clear backpacks for elementary students and up. They provided them free of charge for families unable to purchase them. The reason was because of the threat of gun violence in our schools. If the school district can determine how things are brought into the school, certainly they can have rules about what is brought into the school.
Haidt recommends having a phone-free campus, by which he means cellphones are physically locked up and inaccessible during the day. This would be a good start, but I’d like to take it a step further: Smartphones should not be allowed on campus at all.
Deep breath. Hear me out.
Students could bring flip phones, no problem. The removal of smartphones entirely would remove the unsupervised internet use after and before school, lessen the social contagion of everyone having one, as well as remove the most addictive part of the phone, which is the internet connection, while allowing students to still communicate with their parents.
We don’t allow cigarettes on campus locked in a locker; we shouldn’t allow smartphones either, especially since, to make the comparison accurate, students would be lighting up in the school restrooms for 43 minutes a day while schools claim to be smoke-free.
Yes, the students will still have Chromebooks and tablets for in-classroom use, which creates its own monitoring challenges for teachers and distractions for students, but let’s start somewhere.