If you step onto our campuses across the William S. Hart Union High School District these days, the difference is hard to miss. Classrooms are quieter. Students are actually talking to the person sitting across from them rather than staring into their phones.
Giving teachers back their classrooms by getting phones off desks was the right call, and our staff and parents have welcomed the change.
Still, talk to any teacher after last period, or listen to parents at a board meeting or community gatherings, and you realize pretty quickly that the bell at 3 p.m. tells a different story.
Take a typical junior — let’s call him Timmy. He follows the rules all day. His phone sits at the bottom of his backpack through chemistry and history, untouched. But the moment the school is over, the phone screen lights up. By midnight, he’s still in bed scrolling through short-form video loops on Tik Tok or Instagram, dodging notifications in noisy group chats, and absorbing whatever artificial-intelligence-generated posts land on his feed as if they were established facts.
That disconnect was spelled out clearly when student advocates partnered with Assemblymember Josh Hoover on new digital wellness legislation. The kids said something adults often overlook: Taking a phone away during third period solves a classroom management headache, but it doesn’t teach a teenager how to live with that device once they walk out the school gate.
If we want our kids to develop genuine self-reliance, physical bans are only half the job. The rest comes down to practical, objective digital literacy.
I hear this constantly from teachers and parents: A kid sits down to do 20 minutes of homework, and four hours later they’re still trapped in the scroll. That isn’t simply a lack of willpower.
Multi-billion-dollar algorithms are specifically engineered to keep their eyes there. We need to teach students the mechanics of that business model. When kids understand how dopamine triggers operate, how notifications are weaponized, and how to change their own settings to shut off the noise, they take back control, and that is what we want, don’t we?
Then there is the sheer volume of synthetic, made-up, half cooked information landing in their pockets. Between chatbots and sophisticated deepfakes, our students are swimming in content that looks convincing but lacks substance.
The answer isn’t panic; it’s old-fashioned discernment. When a teenager sees a sensational video, their first instinct shouldn’t be to hit “repost.” They need the discipline to ask simple questions: Who made this? What’s the source? Could this be AI-generated? Is this biased and serving a particular agenda?
Districts that have tackled this well — places like Texas and Indiana that restricted campus devices early on — found that phone policies only stick when you explain the physical cost. Kids need to see how blue light destroys their sleep, why homework drags on twice as long with a screen buzzing nearby, and why an in-person conversation beats a chat streak every time.
Schools can’t replace parents, and they never should. The home is where values and family rules are built. Schools and parents need to partner to help kids learn about how to think for themselves, take care of their attention spans, and keep these devices where they belong — in their pockets, not running their lives.
Dr. Aakash Ahuja is a member of the William S. Hart Union High School District board of trustees.
