The Colorado Department of Law will join a growing number of Colorado school districts to find ways to curb student cellphone use during school with a grant program to fund strategies to keep students focused on learning, not their devices.
The grant program, announced Friday afternoon by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser during a discussion on district smartphone strategies in Mesa County Valley School District 51 in Grand Junction, will distribute $50,000 grants to districts to help schools limit distractions cellphones create for students. That could include installing phone storage devices in classrooms, rolling out technology that restricts specific smartphone features or developing programs that walk students through how to use their devices responsibly, according to a statement from Weiser’s office.
“We’re living at a time where we are experiencing a connection crisis,” Weiser told The Colorado Sun. “A lot of students don’t have trusted relationships with people they know they can talk to, and instead they’re turning to their phones and feeling worse.”
Weiser said he is particularly concerned about the ways social media harms students’ mental health — ways illuminated through the state’s Safe2Tell program in reports of bullying, acts of self-harm and suicide attempts.
An anxiety-ridden era fueled in part by the pandemic and social media has made “this a really hard time to be a kid,” Weiser said. “And so I’m scared and I recognize that the consequences down the road for unhealthy kids and kids struggling with mental health are going to be significant.”
The new grant program falls as many school districts across Colorado and the country are wrestling with a complicated balancing act: incorporating devices into lessons as learning tools while also preventing smartphones from disrupting students’ focus on academics. Some districts have instituted cellphone bans during classes and, in some cases, during lunch and passing periods. Other districts let individual schools make their cellphone policies.
In District 51, cellphones and other personal devices are banned in preschool through middle school. High schoolers can access their phones during lunch and passing periods, but otherwise must have them silenced and tucked away in lockers or a designated classroom storage device, according to Superintendent Brian Hill.
The district began exploring how to help students redefine their relationship with devices more than a year ago after concerns about students’ mental health, Hill said.
The limits on cellphone use have nudged students to spend more time talking to each other rather than poring over their screens and have even prompted some students to devote less time to their phones at home, he said.
“When everybody is off their phone, it’s not as big of a deal to them,” Hill said.
Before the Department of Law selects districts to test out different strategies around reducing class-time cellphone use with grant funds, the department plans to collect data from districts to better gauge what their cellphone policies look like. The department also wants to understand the challenges schools encounter in enforcing those policies and what they need to more effectively keep devices out of the hands and minds of kids at school.
The new program adds to a broader effort at the state level to combat a youth mental health crisis by helping students find a greater sense of connection and adopt healthier coping mechanisms.
Earlier this year, Weiser announced a $20 million grant program geared toward helping schools band together with community partners to boost student connection and discourage youth vaping. Funding for the program came from a multimillion dollar settlement with Juul Labs, Inc., stemming from a lawsuit filed against the company for preying on young people and not being transparent about the health risks associated with vaping.
Colorado is also part of a lawsuit filed by states against Meta in light of the detrimental impacts of Facebook and Instagram on kids and teens. Meanwhile, Weiser last month signed a letter to Congress with 41 other attorneys general urging lawmakers to prioritize legislation mandating a U.S. surgeon general warning on all social media platforms that run on algorithms.
Weiser said he hopes that after schools begin putting new smartphone strategies in motion with grant funding, they will over time make their most effective tools available to other districts.
“We need schools to be aware of this issue, concerned about the consequences and then develop policies, approaches and a school culture that better supports kids,” he said.
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