New toolkit can help parents, community members make schools phone-free

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Jan. 15, 2024

Ashwin Verghese
717 676 8584
[email protected]

MEDIA ADVISORY

New toolkit can help parents, community members make schools phone-free

The Phone-Free Schools Movement and the nonprofit Fairplay are launching a new toolkit today that will help parents, teachers and community members advocate for their schools to go phone-free.

The Phone-Free Schools Ambassador Toolkit is available to download for free now.

The toolkit provides research about the impact of phones in schools; advice on building community support to remove phones from the schoolday; and specific steps to promote the benefits of a bell-to-bell phone-free school policy to school leaders, state and local officials, and the media. There are also numerous free resources like a sample petition, letter to the school board, infographics and more. 

“As the parents of school-age children, we know that phones in school pose a serious threat to our children’s education, mental health and physical safety,” said Mileva Repasky, co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement. “We know our fellow parents, teachers and neighbors want to help students excel academically and socially by eliminating phone use during the school day. We are proud to work with Fairplay to launch this ambassador toolkit, which can help school communities everywhere take the vital step of going phone-free.”

“This is an important toolkit at an important time,” said David Monahan, campaign director at Fairplay, the leading nonprofit committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture. “It’s not just the experts who are recognizing the urgency of making schools phone-free; it’s all of us. This toolkit will put in the hands of ordinary community members the resources they need to get phones out of their schools.”

Momentum for phone-free schools

The new ambassador toolkit comes a few months after the Phone-Free Schools Movement and Fairplay released a toolkit to help school administrators transition to a phone-free environment. That toolkit has been downloaded by school leaders in all 50 states and across Canada. 

Right now, momentum is growing to get rid of phones in schools, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul among the prominent elected leaders working to enact phone-free school policies. 

More and more politicians, parents, teachers and community members are recognizing the dangers that phones pose in the school environment:

  • 97% of students use phones during school.
  • 72% of high school teachers report that cell phones are a major distraction in the classroom.
  • Phone use is harming students’ mental and physical health, too. Depression and anxiety rates have skyrocketed, and more than 40% of students with the highest social media use rate their overall mental health as poor or very poor.
  • Adolescents who experienced cyberbullying were more than 4 times as likely to report thoughts of suicide and suicide attempts as those who didn’t.
  • On the flip side, students not using their phones during class wrote down 62% more information, and 83% of teachers say they support an all-day phone-free school policy.

School safety

While calls for phone-free schools are growing louder, some critics have said students need access to their phones in case of an emergency. However, security experts say phones actually make children less safe during a crisis. 

Phones distract students from urgent instructions. They jam communication lines and allow dangerous rumors to spread. Phones also give away hiding places by making noises and giving off light. The New York Times also reported last month on “a pattern of middle and high school students exploiting phones and social media to arrange, provoke, capture and spread footage of brutal beatings among their peers.”

Download the free Phone-Free Schools Ambassador Toolkit.

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