How Smartphones Impact Mental Health, Part 2: How Washington Educators Are Addressing Smartphones in Schools

Washington State school districts experiment with limits and lawsuits to improve the health and engagement of their students.

by Amanda Sorell

In Part 1 of this mental health miniseries, we explored how adults and adolescents alike spend hours per day on their smartphones, leading to diminished focus, memory, and sleep — and youth, whose brains are still developing, and who have mostly never known a world without cellphones, are uniquely impacted. Throughout Washington State, school districts are stepping in to limit use and boost the attention and wellness of their students.

In a recent League of Education Voters (LEV) webinar intended to "explore the impact of smartphones on student mental health" and "learn from a school district in Washington state that has enacted a smartphone ban," Washington State teachers and students spoke about smartphones and social media use in schools.

Luca Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington who researches "how the social and affective developmental tasks of adolescence have been transformed by the digital era," was a panelist on the webinar. Adolescence, she said in the webinar, is "a time in our lives where we are developing our executive function and our capacity to regulate our behavior. So I believe that all young people I talk to are really trying to regulate their use, but they're really struggling to do so."

Magis-Weinberg leads the interACTlab (International Adolescent Connection and Technology Laboratory), and through this work, she collaborates with nonprofit Common Sense Media, whose education branch has developed a curriculum on digital well-being that schools can adopt. Magis-Weinberg translates and culturally adapts these materials for schools in Latin America. She told the Emerald that she sees in social media "tremendous opportunity and also risk for harm. … There's opportunity for entertainment, there's opportunity for communication … for information and education, and to really actively participate as a citizen of the world." But despite those opportunities, she references the four Cs of risk, defined as content, contact, conduct, and contract. Content is a risk when it's illegal, inappropriate, or harmful. Contact includes encounters with other users online, which can involve interaction with adults. Conduct entails online behavior, such as cyberbullying and what Magis-Weinberg calls "digital drama, which are all these conflicts and misunderstandings that when they're happening online get amplified. … And they just consume the lives of adolescents." And commerce involves advertising, phishing, scams, and gambling. In some of these categories, people can generally agree on what crosses the line, while in others, there's no consensus, Magis-Weinberg says. "What is censorship? What is free speech? Because I think there's many things that we could all agree that children or adolescents shouldn't be consuming. I think no one would be against the idea that children should not consume violent content online. But when it comes to things like sexual and reproductive health services, opinions may drastically vary, right? … So I think it's very, very hard to tread that line."

Magis-Weinberg says another area that's unclear is research on whether social media use explicitly causes depression and anxiety in some adolescents, or whether adolescents who already experience anxiety and depression then use social media more and in unhealthier ways: "A lot of the research is moving into this idea of susceptibility and who are those who are susceptible?" She says someone's susceptibility can be influenced by "your interpersonal relationships with your friends and your family, your context, how much support you have, your own mental health. … There's so many things that are making some people very susceptible." Where research is clear, she says, is on social media's correlation with body-image issues. As someone scrolls, their feeds are personalized to boost whatever it is they linger on, whether that's exercise, diets, or thigh gaps. "All of this viral content, unfortunately, really amplifies many of the risk factors for body image disorders," she said.

Screens are also displacing sleep for young people, who Magis-Weinberg says are sleeping about six hours per night when they should be sleeping nine, and some of that has to do with the perceived need to be available at all hours. "Even in the middle of the night, if [a friend texts and] you don't respond, you're not a good friend. So people are feeling what we now call 'availability stress,' they need to be constantly available. Partly because that's the social norm."

All of these impacts, Magis-Weinberg says, are happening in platforms powered by business models designed to keep users present on the platform while they collect personal data and compete for time. And to confront this, she says youth need training and "scaffolding that is adaptive to their age and their developmental stage."

Banning Smartphones in Schools

The Peninsula School District in Gig Harbor, Washington, has assembled such scaffolding by implementing a ban on phones during school hours, becoming one of a handful of Washington State school districts to limit students' phone use. Different schools in the district have some flexibility in how to implement the ban — whether students can use their phones during lunchtime, for example. But at Kopachuk Middle School, phones are to be put away from the time the first bell rings until the end of the day, and Principal Kelsey Parke says this clear expectation is helpful, versus confusing students by allowing phones sometimes and not others, or by leaving it up to individual teachers to enforce or students to self-moderate.

The school makes exceptions for students who need their phones for translation services or some other access purpose. Rather than a punitive zero-tolerance policy, the school uses PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support) Rewards, through which students have the opportunity to earn limited phone use. And while students sometimes push back on the ban ("We do have students who test boundaries, obviously, they're in middle school!"), Parke says it has resulted in a dramatic decrease in cyberbullying (to "almost zero"), as well as increased empathy among the students. "We've really worked on … how to collaborate with peers, how to resolve conflict. … Students are using these strategies and skills appropriately, rather than going on to texting or social media or something and putting people on blast. How they treat each other is just so much more positive. It's so much more engaging. You see kids playing again at lunchtime, and seeing their naive child behavior come back has been huge," Parke told the Emerald.

And it's not just educators who have noticed the difference — students, too, have remarked on its impacts. On the LEV webinar, Kris Hagel, executive director of learning and innovation at the Peninsula School District, said, "There was a kid in one of the classrooms that we met with who said, 'You know, I have ADHD. And this thing just made it so much worse, because I'm constantly distracted by what's going on, and the notifications that are popping up. And I was never paying attention.' And a bunch of these kids were saying … 'We have better grades this year than we've ever had before. We're getting more work done.'"

The district sought community input before developing the district-wide policy, and collaborated with students to gather feedback and to create a PSA for students in other school districts about its effects, "to kind of explain to kids, by kids why this is important and why we're rolling out with it," Parke said. She says the district has received calls from other schools, including one in Tukwila, that are interested in learning more about the policy and its implementation.

In January, a House Bill was introduced that would ban phones in Washington schools by 2027. It had bipartisan support but ultimately stalled. And while a phone ban has worked for the Peninsula School District, its educators are cautious about a more sweeping statewide ban. Parke says getting support and buy-in about the best outcome for their community was what made the policy successful. And on the webinar, Hagel said, "I think we can show the benefits that we see from it happening in our districts, and hopefully others will decide to make that decision for themselves. But I think it's really important that school districts make that decision on what will work best on the timeline that works best for them."

Brooke Brown, the 2021 Washington State teacher of the year and an instructional equity specialist at the Franklin Pierce School District, said on the webinar that building trust, prioritizing students' mental health, and prioritizing equity of access to learning should be priorities on the path forward. "If we're … minimizing the amount of cellphone time in class, are we really focusing on that equitable, culturally responsive instruction? Are we providing opportunities for students to be engaged in what's happening in class? … I don't think the answer to everything that's happening in schools today is connected to the cellphone. … There's a lot of shared responsibility. And there's a lot of shared opportunity, I think, for us to build trust, for us to build cognitive engagement, for us to build our students' social emotional skills, for us to learn from our students."

Maria De Luna, a student at Bethel Virtual Academy in the Bethel School District and a panelist on the webinar, emphasized that involving students in the decision-making is important, making it a "shared responsibility" instead of an "us versus them mentality." She said educators should be transparent about the changes and what's being done to analyze those changes. "I think that's the most important thing that I've taken away: just more transparency and having more of that discussion with students," she said.

Suing Social Media Companies

While no Seattle schools have yet implemented an all-out ban, the Seattle Public Schools (SPS) district is taking another tack: suing the tech companies themselves for designing products that keep kids hooked, saying that school districts are "at the front lines of the youth mental health crisis" and "We cannot ignore the mental health needs of our students and the role that social media companies play." This lawsuit, filed in January 2023 against TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, and YouTube, is the first of its kind, and SPS is seeking two outcomes: Changes to the "intentional and harmful" business practices that target youth, and resources to help schools address the increased need for student mental health services. Its lawsuit alleges, "Defendants have maximized the time users—particularly youth—spend on their platforms by purposely designing, refining, and operating them to exploit the neurophysiology of the brain's reward systems to keep users coming back, coming back frequently, and staying on the respective platforms for as long as possible. … Defendants' misconduct has been a substantial factor in causing a youth mental health crisis, which has been marked by higher and higher proportions of youth struggling with anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm, and suicidal ideation."

The lawsuit details how SPS has required additional resources to address mental health issues through hiring, training, and lesson plans. Since SPS's lawsuit was filed, KUOW reports, more than 50 other school districts, including Spokane, Kent, Vancouver, and Evergreen, have joined the suit, and 41 states plus the District of Columbia have also sued Meta, saying the company has harmed children's mental health. In response, Reuters reports, some of the platforms have pointed out the features they've developed to encourage safe usage.

But whether we're an individual user, a parent, an educator, or a student, how we engage with our phones remains mostly up to us, our schools, and our families. At home, Principal Parke's family has implemented a no-phones-at-dinner policy. "We're just unplugging for a little bit. And even if it's just a little bit, it's getting used to that clear boundary. We compare it to sugar in our family, saying, 'OK, well, we can't eat a ton of sugar all the time, because otherwise we would be really unhealthy.' … We just have real conversations about being mindful about when we're using it and when we're engaging with each other and prioritizing that time together." And overall, Magis-Weinberg says it's "quality over quantity. Making sure that you're using social media and digital media in balance with key aspects of your life. … You can work backwards, like how much time in your day do you have for social media, making sure that it's not crowding out physical activity, sleep, time in person with people that are important to you. I think we need to be very critical consumers of a landscape that's changing drastically."

Amanda Sorell is a storyteller who lives in Seattle. She's an editor for the Emerald. Read her newsletter at eClips.Substack.com.

Featured image via DavideAngelini/Shutterstock.com.