The daily fight that teachers face isn’t with their students, but with the devices that captivate their attention. Like many other schools across the globe, Fairfax County Public Schools has introduced phone pouches into all of their middle and high schools this school year. While controlling students’ phone usage throughout the day should be a priority for schools, phone pouches are too expensive and ineffective to be implemented as a permanent solution for this issue.
The company creating these pouches, Yondr, has helped educators create a fool-proof way to keep students disengaged with their cell phones all school day. Upon entering a school’s phone-free zone, students must place their phones into the soft pouches fit to hold an average-sized cell phone. The pouches are then closed and sealed with a magnetic lock by a faculty member. Students are unable to access their phones, but can hold onto them while they are inside the pouches for the duration of the day. Pouches can only be unlocked once school is over and during the school day when students are located in designated zones around the building.
According to Yondr, 83%of schools reported seeing an increase in student engagement in classrooms after implementing the Yondr system. While this method has shown significant improvements in classrooms, the cost and time that’s spent putting this system in place isn’t worth the results, especially where there are more convenient and cost-effective alternatives.
According to a Yondr spokesperson, this system can cost around $25 to $30 per student. Supplying a pouch for each of WJ’s 3,061 students would cost anywhere from $76,525 to $91,830.
The pouches are also not the most effective method to eliminate phone use in classrooms. The University of Texas’s McCombs School of Business ran a study on the negative impacts of having your phone on your person while trying to focus. This study showed that people who tried to perform simple cognitive tasks while having their phone in their pocket or bag had a harder time focusing compared to those who had their phone out of their reach.
Instead of locking up students’ phones for the day, each classroom can be fitted with phone pockets mounted onto the wall where phones are visible to the whole class and teacher throughout the period. This way students can quickly access their phones during passing periods and emergencies with teacher permission. This method is also significantly cheaper with a set of pockets costing about $17 per classroom.
While cell phones have been an increasing issue in classrooms, throwing money at the problem will only waste school districts’ resources since there are more affordable and effective ways to resolve the problem resting in students’ hands.
