The Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia (FCPS) is launching a pilot program for a number of center colleges to ban college students' cellphone entry in the course of the faculty day, beginning within the 2024-25 faculty 12 months.
Seven schools will take part within the pilot program: Frost Center Faculty, Irving Center Faculty, Jackson Center Faculty, Poe Center Faculty, Robinson Center Faculty, Thoreau Center Faculty and Twain Center Faculty.
The colleges "will likely be phone-free in the course of the faculty day so as to restrict classroom disruptions and enhance scholar engagement and studying," FCPS mentioned on its web site.
Through the week of September 2, college students attending colleges within the pilot program will obtain a mobile phone storage pouch, known as a Yondr pouch, which is magnetic and prevents college students from utilizing their telephones, together with for social media, textual content messages and telephone calls.
STATE LAWMAKERS PUSH FOR BAN ON PHONES IN SCHOOLS
Cell phones are locked into "Yondr" pouches earlier than individuals enter an exhibition on the Brooklyn Museum on November 22, 2019, in New York Metropolis. (Getty Photos)
College students will likely be chargeable for their very own Yondr pouch and can deliver it with them to highschool day-after-day.
Upon arriving at college every morning, college students will safely lock their telephone of their Yondr pouch and carry it inside their backpack. Airpods should be secured within the pouch or positioned within the college students' backpacks whereas smartwatches should be turned off or placed on airplane mode.
In conditions the place there's a household emergency, dad and mom might contact the college's entrance workplace.
"The aim of the pilot program is to create a extra engaged studying setting for college students, freed from distraction from cell telephones and social media," FCPS mentioned on its web site. "Research present that college students who use their cell telephones throughout tutorial time focus much less, study much less, and obtain decrease grades."
College students will likely be chargeable for their very own Yondr pouch and can deliver it with them to highschool day-after-day. (Getty Photos)
The brand new cellphone coverage will likely be enforced bell to bell every day at college.
College students will maintain onto their telephones all through the day however is not going to use them till their pouches are opened on the finish of the college day at a Yondr unlocking station.
If a scholar forgets their pouch, they have to retailer their cellphone within the entrance workplace for the college day, and it will likely be returned to the coed after faculty.
Within the occasion that a scholar damages or loses their pouch, faculty workers will gather the telephone or pouch and ship it to the entrance workplace for the rest of the college day, and the coed will likely be assessed an $18 alternative charge.
Through the 2024-25 faculty 12 months, seven colleges will likely be collaborating within the pilot program. (AP Photograph/Kiichiro Sato, File)
This comes after Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order final month directing the Virginia Division of Training "to draft steering for public faculty divisions to undertake native insurance policies and procedures establishing cell phone-free training."
"The need of implementing cell-phone free training in Virginia's Okay-12 public colleges is more and more evident," Youngkin wrote within the order. "Dad and mom, public well being professionals, educators, and different stakeholders throughout the Commonwealth are expressing concern over the alarming psychological well being disaster and power well being circumstances affecting adolescents, resembling melancholy and nervousness, pushed partially by in depth social media utilization and widespread mobile phone possession amongst kids."
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"Cellphone-free training will considerably cut back the period of time college students will be on telephones with out parental supervision," he added.
Different faculty districts in Virginia and elsewhere, together with California, New York, Texas and Georgia, have additionally begun implementing insurance policies proscribing cellphone use in the course of the faculty day, with many using the Yondr pouches.