Saxe Middle School soon will see students locking electronic devices—including cell phones, smartwatches and tablets—kept in a locking pouch system throughout the day as part of an updated policy on the electronics’ use, district officials say.
The “Phone-Free Schools” initiative at Saxe is expected to launch around mid-September, once the pouches are in hand, according to Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi.
“We’re looking at some of the implementation as a design thinking challenge,” he said during a special Board of Education meeting, held Aug. 26 in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School and via videoconference.
“How do you create a system that best enables students to lock and unlock their pouches as they’re coming and going during the day?” Luizzi continued. “And how do we make that better and better? We’ll have focus groups of fifth- and sixth-grade students, focus groups of seventh- and eighth-grade students, and we want them to be as much a part of this as possible.”
The comments came during a general update about New Canaan’s Phone-Free Schools initiative, which had been communicated out via email to school parents earlier in August. Luizzi said that more than 3,000 schools nationwide are doing something similar and that the district has been looking at a change for a number of years, including just before the pandemic when “everything changed in March of 2020.”
“And instead of having this conversation, we really had to have the opposite: How do we lean into technology in order to navigate the challenges that we’re having?” Luizzi said. “So we’ve got that in the rearview mirror, and now we’ve been building momentum again around doing this work within our classrooms, with our teachers and our kids.”
He added: “Without question, having phones in classrooms can provide distraction for kids, make learning more difficult, make teaching more difficult and cause some other problems. Our thinking as a district has been evolving for many years.”
The new policy at Saxe replaces one whereby students are prohibited from using cellphones during school hours (powered off or silenced and kept in a backpack or locker).
The district intends to partner with local organizations such as New Canaan CARES and New Canaan Unplugged, and is in discussion to put together a November community event on managing technology.
“Nobody’s saying that they [students] shouldn’t have a relationship with it [mobile device use], but we need to make sure that the individual is the one making the decisions about when and why and how to access instead of getting caught in that dopamine addiction cycle,” Luizzi said.
New Canaan’s elementary schools remain phone- and device-free, while NCHS students will be required to place devices such as smartphones and watches in cellphone holders within the classroom. The high school’s policy could be updated again, based on data and information gleaned from the Saxe initiative, officials said.
At the heart of the changes, Luizzi said, is the schools’ prioritization of students and their learning, and the district anticipates that students who learn how to put their devices away for extended periods of time will benefit outside of school, too. He cited one eighth-grader’s observation in another Phone-Free district that because the devices weren’t pinging notifications at the students, they learned that they weren’t actually missing out by not having them.
“We are in an information-saturated world, and we have kids that are getting information and updates about things that really are not relevant to their life, to where they are, to what they’re doing,” Luizzi said. “It’s interesting, but a fifth-grade student doesn’t need to be notified about a discussion of tariffs happening on the other side of the world where they’re about to go into their math class, or when they could instead be talking to kids at a lunch table. We’re all in this place that the information is so readily available that things that really are not relevant present themselves as important. And to help students to sort through that and develop the skills to discern what do I need to know, what don’t I need to know, what’s important for me, what’s going to help me in what my goals are in what I’m doing, and what might actually detract from all of that—I think that this kind of an approach, certainly for our kids in middle school, will help us with that.”
The district will hold focus groups with students in the coming months to “generate the right solution at the high school,” he said.
Board of Ed members asked whether teachers would participate in putting away devices (they’ll use Velcro pouches to model the behavior) and whether exceptions would be made (yes, for example, a student who has a continuous glucose monitor through their device).
Luizzi said that the Saxe team overseeing the Phone-Free rollout would report back to the administration and Board as it unfolds.
“We’re not kidding ourselves,” Luizzi said. “The first couple of weeks are gonna be a challenge, but we know that. But everything we’ve seen and read tells us that it’s well worth the effort.”