Starting this school year, the Carson City School District joined Clark County and a growing number of districts around the nation in banning smartphones in class. On Sept. 23, California Gov. Gavin Newsom—following the lead of Florida, Louisiana and Indiana—signed legislation to restrict phone use among the state’s 6 million public-school students. Districts have cited distraction, disruption and mental health concerns.
Last month, the RN&R reported on the Carson City ban. Shortly afterward, we heard from a few readers who opposed the ban and could not imagine being out of touch with their children during a school emergency. Two Reno parents, both of whom are also teachers, shared their perspectives on the pros and cons of hyper-connected students—and while both agree that disruption in classrooms is an issue, they ultimately side in favor of phones in school.
Emergency calls and a lifeline to Mom
In the spring of 2022, Michelle Hammond, then a Washoe County School District employee, was addressing a power struggle between Sparks fifth-graders, who wanted to carry phones, and teachers, who wanted phone-free classrooms.
The students walked her onto the playground, she said, and pointed out a part of the schoolyard that’s out of teachers’ sight and faces a busy street.
“They’re, like, ‘So, what if a school shooter came?’” Hammond said. The kids feared that an intruder could easily jump the fence, escaping teachers’ notice. If that were to happen, the kids reasoned, they would need to call someone. “We can’t even call a teacher without a phone if the teacher’s too far away to hear us, because the playground’s so big,” Hammond remembered the students saying.
“They had this whole scenario in their heads,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘This is what you guys think about?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah.’ … It broke my heart.”
“I worked very closely with school police. We did drills regularly. But in a true emergency, even I, myself, panicked—it’s very difficult for anybody to stay calm.” Michelle Hammond, former teacher
Today, Hammond is a real estate agent. Her two daughters have each given her a reason to favor phones in schools. Her eldest, 21, is prone to anxiety.
“People aren’t realizing that kids are getting secondary trauma just from watching these school shootings play out,” Hammond said.
Those fears were just one part of a cocktail of everyday worries that could exacerbate her daughter’s anxiety. When she was in class, and the anxiety mounted to unmanageable levels, she would sometimes hide out in the bathroom, where she would text her mom.
“I was always, of course, her safe space,” said Hammond. “I calm her down and bring her back to reality and tell her she’s OK. I wanted her to be able to reach out to me at any time, to have some reassurance.”
Hammond’s younger daughter, 17, attends North Valleys High School. In May, a fight involving around 50 young people broke out at Golden Valley Park, about a mile from the school. No one was injured, but a gun was discharged into the ground, and police appeared on the scene. From the school, Hammond’s daughter heard sirens. The school ordered a lockdown, and many students assumed that meant an incident was taking place on campus.
When her daughter called to say, “Mom, don’t panic; I just want you to know I’m safe,” Hammond was relieved that her daughter had the technology—and the autonomy—to stay in touch.
Hammond worked in the Washoe County School District for 15 years. She’s seen a lot of drills and a lot of actual emergencies. Her conclusion: “There is a true fight-flight-or-freeze natural-response system that we all have that is going to come into play when it’s not a drill. I’ve just told my kids, unfortunately, there are 2,400 students at North Valley High School; the teachers can only watch out for so many kids. No one is ultimately going to be watching out for your life more than you. … I was so highly trained on how to deal with all this. I worked very closely with school police. We did drills regularly. But in a true emergency, even I, myself, panicked—it’s very difficult for anybody to stay calm.”
As a teacher, Hammond is as frustrated as anyone by the power struggles and distractions that smartphone usage brings to classrooms. But she thinks there are some smart moves teachers can make to curb these problems.
“It’s our job to keep those students engaged enough to stay off their phones,” she said. She wants to see more hands-on lessons and “classrooms that are not boring.”
“I mean, phones now, they’ve just become too much a part of everybody’s life,” she said. “How many of you adults can give up your phones? If you walked into an office, and your boss said, ‘Put your phone right here until the end of the day,’ how many of you would stay at that job?”
Lessons and lockdowns
Kim Cuevas left classroom teaching in 2006, a year before the first iPhone was launched. She moved to administration for many years, and returned to the classroom three years ago. She now teaches 10th and 11th grade English at McQueen High School. When she first landed in the modern era of hyper-connected students, she thought, “Could we put our cell phones in our backpacks and just pay attention to instruction?”
Now, she calls that “a super cute idea.”
“Nobody does that,” she said. Cell phones are present in her classroom, but, starting this school year, she has a new rule.
“I actually make my kids put their cell phones in a caddy in my classroom, because I cannot stand fighting them about their phones anymore. … I got my instructional time back,” she said.
Cuevas sometimes instructs students to retrieve their phones from the caddy as part of a lesson. Her 11th-graders are reading The Scarlet Letter this semester. Their character-study assignment is to select the apps that a character from the book would need on their phone if they existed in 2024 instead of 1850, and briefly explain their selections in writing.
But choosing the right shopping app for Hester Prynne is not reason enough alone to favor phones in class. Cuevas has a more pressing justification.
On Sept. 23, McQueen issued a lockdown. It was not a drill.
“It’s the second one we’ve had this year at my school,” Cuevas said. “And I will tell you that it is absolutely frightening. … When that happens, there are kids running, and there are kids trying to get to cover, and then you are in your room in the dark for a certain amount of time with kids who are legitimately scared. Every one of my students grabbed their phones out of my cell-phone caddy, and they all got on the floor, and they were all texting their other friends, texting their parents.”
Cuevas swapped texts with her own son, who’s a 17-year-old senior at McQueen.
According to a letter that the school sent to parents, which the WCSD provided to the RN&R, the Sept. 23 lockdown was due to a “system error.” That doesn’t change Cuevas’ mind about cell phones at all.
“I would never want to work someplace where they took our phones at the door and put them in zipper pouches or something, because I can’t imagine my students, or even my own child, who was up in the main building, not having their phones on them in my classroom today, because they needed them,” she said.
The school district declined to provide the RN&R with the number of lockdowns that occur annually; we have filed a public-records request.
Meanwhile, KTVN Channel 2 news reported on Sept. 6 that the district had reported “almost a dozen non-planned emergency activations” so far during the school year—which started just 16 days before that report. “Emergency activations” is the term the district implemented recently to include “lockdowns,” formerly called “code reds,” and “secured campuses,” formerly “code yellows.”