MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Monongalia County School System will move forward with guidelines that would limit the amount of time students would be able to use their phones during a regular school day.
The new guidelines were announced as part of the Monongalia County Board of Education’s (BOE) regular meeting Tuesday and will require students from grades K-12 to not have their cell phones out during regular school hours. The implementation of the guidelines comes with support from school administrators in the county’s elementary, middle, and high schools and will come with equipment that will be given to every student so they’ll be able to properly store their phone in a place where they can focus on what is going on in the classroom.
“We’re really happy that our board has been supportive, they’ve given us the financial means to buy the equipment that we need that we truly think is going to make parents and students feel as comfortable as possible,” said Monongalia County School Superintendent Eddie Campbell. “It’s much needed.”
When students enter their respective schools starting the 2024-25 school year, they will be given individual Yondr bags, which will be kept with their belongings or placed in certain locations depending on each school. The amount of time a student will have their cell phone on their person would also depend on the individual school, with the school system offering flexibility to adjust guidelines throughout the year if necessary. While elementary schools are expected to have less of an issue with the guidelines, middle schools and high schools have made preparations with bag hanging magnets that will be strategically placed throughout an individual school, with discipline measures in place depending on if a student is disruptive, late, etc. This is also separate from the guidelines that will be in place so parents can reach out to students via their respective schools.
“I think there’ll be a learning curve, obviously, to anything,” said Morgantown High School Principal Paul Mihalko ahead of the 2024-25 school year. “People are going to be worried about ‘What am I going to do in an emergency?’, we have all those things answered, you can certainly contact the school at any time to talk with their student if you want to, we’ll get your child for you out of class and have those conversations,” he said.
The Yondr bags, along with the magnets that will be given to each middle school and high school, cost approximately $150,000 for the school system.
According to Campbell and administrators, when the new guidelines were given a trial run before the 2024-25 school year, parents of Monongalia County students overwhelmingly supported the new measures. The example presented to the BOE, involved Suncrest Middle School and their trail run last year, where Principal Dawna Hicks reported an 85 percent decrease in phone related discipline (i.e., distractions in class, fights, etc.). While there were some initial concerns in regards to emergencies, it eventually became an easy sell to parents based on interactions at home, results that both educators and school system administrators believe can be seen during the 2024-25 school year.
“Also, what we saw with club days and interactions with students, they were talking, playing games, engaging, laughing, they were being kids,” said Hicks, based on what she saw about a month into the 2023-24 school year as part of their trial run of the cell phone guidelines. “And parents started seeing this even at home, and they thanked us for that, so you can’t go wrong (giving these guidelines a try),” she said.
When the new guidelines come into effect, the Monongalia County School System will become the second school system in West Virginia to implement such a practice. The Ohio County Board of Education passed a policy on Monday that banned cell phone use during the school day for elementary and middle school students, with the Berkeley County School System considering a similar motion in the coming weeks. These efforts stem from the results from places like Suncrest Middle, whose staff willingly approached administrators for a trial run, plus national studies where social media usage has been found to have a profoundly negative affect on the well-being of students, with suicide attempts rising nationally depending on age and gender demographics being a major red flag (the BOE presentation reported a 51 percent rise in attempted suicides by female teens nationwide, with social media being a major cause). While Campbell and other administrators expect some pushback, they also plan to support each school as they plan to enforce the new cell phone guidelines throughout the 2024-25 school year.
“There’s going to be some frustrations, there’s going to be some pushback, just like there was in the middle schools, and I think we’ll work through those things,” said Campbell. “We’re going to be very supportive of our schools, the board is going to be very supportive of our schools because we think this is important for our kids,” he said.