Student smartphone policy gets dialed back

Seasoned mountain climbers will tell you that taking a step back is sometimes as necessary as moving forward. Progress — the whole point of the climb — is important, but so are the moments that allow you to reflect and rethink your trajectory.

Kalispell Middle School embraced that notion when it decided last week to tighten its mobile device policy. The rollback came in consideration of documented connections between smartphone use in schools and anxiety, attention span and information retention.

Going forward, smartphones, smartwatches, tablets and wireless headphones must remain off and in lockers for the duration of the school day. This is a significant change from the old policy, which allowed students to use mobile devices between classes, at lunch and in a classroom at a teacher’s discretion.

Inter Lake reporter Hilary Matheson’s Feb. 19 article on the policy change garnered an outpouring of feedback that was overwhelmingly in favor of the stricter rules.

One parent commented about the importance of nurturing real — not online — social skills. Others noted that the teenage years can be difficult enough without the pressures of cyberbullying or chasing social media perfection.

In fact, Kalispell Middle School students themselves mostly agreed with the tightened policy. In a school survey, 28.4% of students wanted to go back to the rule of phones being off and in lockers during school, while nearly 18% preferred an entirely phone-free campus.

It was youth advocate Collin Kartchner’s presentation last fall about the mental-health dangers of social media and screen addiction that prompted the school to scale back its mobile device policy. At his talk in Whitefish, Kartchner implored parents and students to rethink their relationships with smartphones.

“I receive hundreds of messages every day from teens, telling me of the negative impact social media has on their mental health,” Kartchner said. “When you tell them that they can break free from the toxic perfectionism, they clap, they cheer, they cry, they hug me because they are exhausted from trying to be perfect.”

Kartchner pulls no punches when he calls screen addition among teens “a public-health crisis.” Numerous studies back up his concerns, including one from the journal Clinical Psychological Science that links a rise in teen suicide to the increasing popularity of social media.

“No kid needs a smartphone, they really don’t,” Kartchner urged.

Kalispell Middle School might just be on the forefront of progress by rolling back its mobile device policy. It’s a smart step back that will put these students on the right path forward.