Putting your phone away for six hours a day turns out to be a wonderful thing – even in the eyes of middle school students who were forced to go without their devices for an entire school year.

By locking away their phones, students at Hampstead Hill Academy said, they were opening their brains. They were in bags that only an administrator could open. They no longer feel the constant urge to glance at it. They no longer sneak to the bathroom to look at their friends’ texts. They are no longer glued to them during lunch or recess to see what drama is unfolding on social media.

Now they play soccer and volleyball and maintain social contacts. They can fully concentrate on math lessons. And their grades have improved.

“This is revolutionary,” says Agustin Aguayo, a seventh-grader at East Baltimore Elementary/Middle School. “If you don’t get good grades, you can’t achieve anything in life.”

Across the Baltimore region, more and more schools are banning the use of smartphones in class. Bolstered by a growing body of research showing the harmfulness of the devices to children, local education authorities are now taking action against policies that until recently Enforcement of these policies falls largely to teachers. The idea of ​​creating phone-free schools is on the table, but that idea has to be sold to anxious parents who have become dependent on being able to reach their children at any time of the day or night.

“I just decided that this is not acceptable and we need to get back to doing our job, which is teaching and learning,” said Mark Bedell, superintendent of Anne Arundel County, whose district this week announced a zero-tolerance policy on cellphone use in the classroom.

Sonja Santelises, executive director of Baltimore City Schools, also said she is committed to tackling the problem this year by encouraging the use of bags or mini lockers for cell phones and covering the costs at schools that voluntarily try the approach.

“This is a time when our young people need adults to stand in the room as adults and say enough is enough,” she said.

These movements accompany a cross-party change of heart across the country.

According to ExcelinEd, a nonprofit education organization, five states have already passed laws restricting cellphone use. Florida bans cellphone use during class and requires students in grades 6-12 to be taught about the effects of social media. And the governor of New York has announced that she will introduce a law banning cellphones in schools next year.

No school system in Maryland prohibits students from bringing their cell phones to school. They say parents have made it clear that they want to be sure their children get to school in the morning and get home at night. The debate is about what to do with the cell phones students carry when they enter the school building.

The research results are clear and convincing, say school representatives.

In a Pew Research Institute survey, 72% of teachers said student distraction from their cell phones was a major problem in their classrooms. And the US Surgeon General sounded a cautionary tale earlier this year, saying social media was having a negative impact on children. A third of young people said they use social media “almost constantly.”

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation: How the Reshaping of Childhood Is Creating an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is one of the most vocal advocates for reducing cell phone use. He traces the beginning of a decline in mental health to 2012, when smartphones became more popular. He notes that loneliness and feelings of isolation increased among teens and academic performance declined, citing reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Last year, Baltimore City Public Schools joined districts across the country in suing the social media companies that operate Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube over the impact of their content on teens’ mental health.

“The severity of the violence increases when social media is also used on mobile phones,” said Santelises.

A small number of schools in the city and Baltimore County will lock cell phones in bags this year. The bags, made by Yondr, are soft cases into which cell phones are slipped and then sealed by school staff with a magnet on the top of the bag. The locked phones will stay with students all day until an administrator unlocks the bags when students leave school in the afternoon.

“The locking and unlocking process was a bit cumbersome at the beginning of the year,” said Bria Shah, an eighth-grader from Hampstead Hill, as she demonstrated how the devices work.

“Just a few seconds,” she said. “And unlocking it is even easier.”

It’s not a foolproof solution. There have been cases of students cutting open their pockets to get to their phone, or putting a broken phone in their pocket while carrying their working phone.

Anne Arundel schools are trying a different tactic. This fall, elementary and middle school students must turn off their cellphones and leave them out of sight throughout the school day, including during lunch and in the hallways, Bedell said. High school students must follow the same guidelines but are allowed to use their cellphones during lunch.

“I want our kids to show us they can be responsible adults, but we also work with the community,” Bedell said. If students can’t put their phones away during the day, he won’t hesitate to make changes, such as using bags, he said.

Local school administrators said they believed they needed to involve parents and the community to find a comprehensive solution to restrict mobile phone use.

According to Superintendent Bill Barnes, student cell phone use is the biggest concern for teachers in Howard County. The school system is reviewing its policies and an advisory group will make recommendations by Jan. 2 on what steps the district can take to limit phone use.

Headteachers and deputy headteachers believe that parental resistance is partly due to a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the problem. At Hampstead Hill, the deputy headteacher said he had developed a presentation to explain to parents the harm caused by mobile phones.

“If you came home and your 11-year-old was smoking weed in the bathroom,” you would do something about it, said Mike Lucas, deputy head of Hampstead Hill. What parents don’t realize, he said, is that allowing their child to spend six hours a night on TikTok could be far more harmful.

Cockeysville Middle School in Baltimore County began taking disciplinary action against students with cell phones last year. Adam Carney, the school’s principal, said they kept records of students who violated the rules and found that students who violated the rules five times had a grade point average that was a full point lower than other students.

“The data shows it’s a distraction,” Carney said. “Nobody realizes how dangerous a cellphone is as a gateway to other things. I think it’s bringing elements into their kids’ lives that they don’t yet know about.” For example, he said, parents may not understand that giving a teen access to TikTok means they can send their child private messages.

The biggest fear of most parents is that they will want to talk to their child if a school shooting occurs, says Matt Hornbeck, head of Hampstead Hill.

“We don’t really want 920 kids pulling out their cell phones when there’s an emergency in the building,” Hornbeck said. Those calls would prevent students from hearing important instructions in an emergency and could cause noise when they want to have some peace and quiet.

The school has installed phones in every classroom and told parents they can call the office and talk to their child for as long as they want.

“We are asking the question…how can we create the right conditions so that enforcement does not fall on the shoulders of teachers?” Santelises said.

In some ways, the changes were slow to come.

When the pandemic hit, cell phones became one of the few ways for students to stay in touch with their friends. Santelises believes students need to learn to interact with each other in person so they can witness the impact their words have on their friends.

Cece Couteau, a seventh-grader, said that now at school, the girls are no longer constantly communicating via text message or social media for six hours a day. “There’s still drama,” Cece said. “It’s more face-to-face drama.”

Baltimore Banner reporter Jess Nocera contributed to this report.