Wilton Schools to Consider Cellphone Ban

In the wake of numerous experts warning of the negative elements stemming from excessive cellphone use — especially for young people — Wilton Public Schools officials intend to explore the possibility of a district-wide ban on the devices during the school day.

On Thursday night, May 23, Superintendent Kevin Smith shared findings explored by district’s Mental Health Task Force that has met three times during the school year. One of the most concerning discoveries was a marked rise in the acting out of primary grade students with mean or harassing behavior.

While the task force could only speculate about possible root causes, including issues relating to coping skills, the pandemic and parenting trends, at its last meeting the group ended up spending an hour discussing cellphone use and social media.

Smith cited a popular new book by psychologist Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation, which argues that the alarming epidemic of mental health issues among young people is traceable to a “phone-based childhood” that grew out of the early 2010s. With the decline of a “play-based childhood,” Haidt states that technology and its trappings have led to damaged social and neurological development that has resulted in major increases in a range of psychological and behavioral issues, including attention fragmentation, addiction, social contagion, sleep deprivation, social comparison and perfectionism.

“There’s a robust conversation underway right now,” Smith said, regarding what Haidt calls “the great rewiring,” which began after 2010 with the rise of phones and social media — Instagram in particular — and correlates to rapid increases in things like depression, anxiety, drug use, self harm and teen suicide.

“In his book he writes about this trend,” Smith said, stating that cellphone access amounts to “the most rapid adoption of any technology in the history of man,” including “social media apps and social media as a phenomenon.”

“He also points out that that’s the same time frame when teen mental health begins to take a real dip,” Smith said.

He explained that Haidt’s hypothesis cites four “foundational harms” that come from cell phone use, including opportunities and time that are lost, social deprivation, sleep deprivation, and a combination of attention fragmentation and behavioral addiction.

“One of his recommendations is to take phones out of school,” Smith said, noting he has been having “very robust conversations” with colleagues in Wilton’s DRG (District Reference Group).

Board members appeared to be in general agreement about looking further into the matter, as well as one parent.

“Kids can’t curb their phone addictions alone because adults can’t either,” parent Michele Perino said.

“Smartphones drastically affect students’ mental health and the opportunity lost with their ability to experience and learn skills for real-life social interactions,” she said.

“If (they) were able to put the phones down during school, just that would make such an enormous difference,” she said.

BOE Chair Ruth DeLuca also expressed support.

“I think it’s something that we should more-than-seriously consider,” she said. “My personal feeling is that the benefits do not outweigh the costs for the six-and-a-half hours that they’re here.”

DeLuca said that a year ago she was on the other side of the fence, but has had her mind changed by the scientific research that’s growing in availability.

“I do think that there is an addiction component to it, with adults, with kids, and I have come to this from the opposite feeling a year ago,” she said.

“I think that it would be worth our time to put together a committee or a task force to really kind of study what it would look like to go ahead and create a middle school and high school environment that is cellphone-free,” she said.

In a short debate on the ramifications of implementing a ban — which Smith said is currently being tried in other Connecticut schools — Assistant Superintendent for Special Services Andrea Leonardi indicated that the district would have to go into it with their eyes open in terms of expected pushback.

“Parents are texting their kids all day long, people,” Leonardi said. “They’re not gonna like that they can’t.”

She also explained how some people would likely — for right or wrong — fight to exempt their children from the ban through medical permissions.

“The disability that requires a cellphone does not exist right now … but it’s gonna come,” she said.

BOE member Heather Priest said legal recourses were probable, but she was in favor.

“I am 100% behind this, by the way,” she said. “I think it’s a fantastic idea.”

Smith, who made a point of conceding that there were benefits to having students equipped with phones, such as possibly bestowing a sense of safety for them, said he still believed they were causing more harm than good.

He said he would bring a more formal proposal to the BOE at its next meeting on Thursday, June 6.

In regard to general mental health, the number of emergency mental health issues that the district has faced the last three years has been increasing at the lower grades.

“We’ve had more kids with more issues in those grade levels,” Smith said, citing grades 3, 5, 6 and 7, with an anecdotal uptick in “mean or harassing behavior.”

“There are some growing concerns among our younger kids,” he said, with the same trend reflecting across the state.

While he speculated on various factors, he noted that some children may be getting robbed of “negotiation skills” by growing up with less independent play.

BOE member Pamela Ely cited the problem of “the worried brain.” 

“I think we have a lot of kids who have worried brains that are struggling … They have to act out because they don’t have any other way of dealing with it,” Ely said.

Leonardi noted that, in general, people have formed a lower tolerance for discomfort, making anxiety rise when they’re faced with it.

“So we’re seeing increases in panic attacks,” Leonardi said, because children are unable to manage and self-regulate their own distress, and understand that it passes.

Ely said some of that is also reflected in parents.

“We have a lot of anxiety in our kids and they’re acting out, but I think the parents are anxious … not so much about safety, but about their performance,” Ely said.

“The worried brain is everywhere,” she said.