Texting. TikTok. ChatGPT.
These are a few of the ways Ontario high school students are using their phones in class — despite the province’s cellphone ban that kicked in last fall.
Hasti, who just finished Grade 10, says she uses her phone in class “all the time.”
“It definitely, most definitely, does not work. It's like the stupidest thing ever,” she told The Trillium of the province’s cellphone crackdown.
“It honestly just has to do with the teacher, because even before the cellphone ban, if that teacher didn't like cellphones, they would have done it before, and they still do it now. It has nothing to do with the ban,” said the York Region District School Board student, who uses her phone for TikTok among other things.
According to many students who spoke to The Trillium and some of its sister publications at Village Media, the Ford government’s cellphone ban doesn’t seem to be working. One said this is a “shame” as it could help students stay focused. The Trillium, which joined five other journalists from across Village Media's network to speak to students in several cities, agreed to only publish the students’ first names to allow them to speak bluntly about their experiences.
Meanwhile, one teacher at a high school east of Toronto said cellphone rules can be successful and pointed to ways his school has made it work.
Framed by the province as an "out of sight and out of mind" policy, the rules require students up to Grade 6 to keep their phones on silent and away for the school day, while those in Grades 7 to 12 have to put them away during “instructional time.”
The policy, which has now been in place for a full school year, states that educators need to confiscate phones that are not kept away either for the duration of a class or the day, and that students can be sent to the principal's office if they don't turn in their phones when asked. Principals can then choose from a range of consequences, including suspension.
Most students who spoke with Village Media said they weren’t aware of any of their peers being sent to the principal’s office for using their cellphones.
Claire, who finished Grade 9 at a Halton Catholic high school, said some of her classmates have been sent to their principal's office for cellphone use.
She said while teachers sometimes take phones away and put them in designated pouches at the front of the classroom, overall the ban doesn’t seem very effective.
Is the ban working?
Other students in Halton's public and Catholic school boards also said they think the ban is making a marginal difference, with reports of high school-aged pupils regularly using their phones in class without the teacher's permission.
"Usually, the teachers will ask you to put your phone away when they're teaching a lesson, but some teachers don't really care enough to enforce it," said Noah, who finished Grade 11 at the Halton District School Board. "Things are pretty much the exact same (as before the ban)."
Amelia, who completed Grade 10 at the York Region District School Board, doesn’t think the ban is working. It depends on “how the teacher puts it in their class,” she said.
She said she takes out her phone to text or if she needs something from a friend.
“But I don't, like, watch TikTok in class or any of that,” Amelia said.
Ella, who finished Grade 11 at Newmarket High School (NHS), said the teachers and students at her school have gradually “given up” on the phone ban to the point where it’s no longer enforced.
“It worked a lot at the start of the semester, and I heard from some of my friends that it was helpful to not have the temptation to go on their phone, but towards the end of the semester, it doesn’t really exist anymore,” Ella said.
Another NHS student, Peter, said that, in most of his classes, it’s like the ban “never happened in the first place.” Lax enforcement by teachers, who he said often don’t notice students on their phones in class, or simply don’t care, undermines the ban’s legitimacy in students’ eyes.
“It seems like, ‘Oh, I’ll get my phone taken away for the rest of the period. Oh well,’” said Peter, who’s going into Grade 12 in the fall. “It’s not really much of a punishment, so I don’t think it’s really effective.”
Alice, a high school student in the District School Board of Niagara, said it's “rare for my classmates to not go on their phones for a whole class,” and that the majority do so without permission from their teachers.
Most teachers, she said, “don't do anything” if they spot a student with a phone in class, but will ask them to put it away if it’s “taking away from the overall learning of a student.”
“At the beginning of the year, the cell phone ban was effective, but as the year progressed, the ban wasn't taken as seriously by teachers,” she said. “Most teachers have given up on trying to get students off their phones. By the end of the year, cellphone use was back to how it was before the ban.”
James, another Niagara Region high school student, said he often uses his phone in class when he has spare time.
He is one of several students who told Village Media they don’t think there’s a point to the ban.
“I don't think there's a point to the ban because teachers choose not to enforce it. So if teachers aren't really obligated for enforcing it, there's no reason to have the ban. People still go on their phones.”
If it were properly enforced, it would be a good idea, as students would be less inclined to turn to their phones in class, James said.
Alice agreed, saying she thinks the ban could have been “very effective and beneficial for students' education.”
“It would have led to students being more focused in class on lessons and desk work,” she said. “It's a shame.”
For Madi, who will enter Grade 11 this fall at the York Region District School Board, the ban is “not being followed for sure,” but is a bit stricter than the year before.
She said sometimes teachers will “tell us to get rid of them, and that's fine, but usually most people can self-regulate, and then there's some who can't, and then the teachers get upset.”
Madi said she thinks the cellphone policies should be up to individual teachers.
Students in the Burlington area also said the ban isn’t working, with Evan, who finished Grade 11, saying while there’s a point to the ban, “it's just never going to go into full effect.”
Hannah, who completed Grade 9, said she and her peers go on their phones during class, but so do educators.
“Teachers reinforce it, but sometimes they even go on their phones after they give instructions,” she said.
Hannah said she thinks the rules should allow for phone use.
“Yes, the point of the ban is for kids to listen to their teacher during a lesson, but in my opinion, as a student, once the student has proven they are done the work assigned in class, they should be able to use their phone,” she said. “That is not disturbing anyone as long as they aren't yelling, but using it silently and appropriately.”
How one high school made the rules work
Head of mathematics at Bowmanville High School Marc Paxton said he didn’t disagree with the students’ comments, but that they were “disappointing” to hear.
“That tells me that those staff members have probably given up or aren't supported enough to really have the energy to do it,” he said, adding that energy levels dip as the school year wears on and “you sort of have to pick and choose your battles.”
What helps is enforcement as a school community, he said.
“The principal needs to be that leader in the school and set the tone, and then the staff really need to work together to make sure that all the staff are on the same page and doing all the same things, so the students can't sort of play mom off of dad and vice versa,” Paxton said.
Without this, “the teacher goes, ‘Well, I've got 15 different things I gotta do today, do I want to spend five or 10 minutes on a battle with a kid around a cellphone?'” said Dave Warda, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation’s (OSSTF) District 14 teachers’ bargaining unit which covers Clarington, Northumberland and Peterborough.
Paxton said the other reason the students’ comments were disappointing is “because I've seen the positive results.”
“I've actually witnessed how much more social interaction there is with these kids in my classroom every day, and so for those kids to be essentially missing that just by going back onto their cellphones is disappointing,” he said.
Paxton said the ban is “absolutely” working at his school — something he attributed to collaboration amongst administrators and staff.
“Our principal was very good about sort of laying out his expectations for the staff, and then it made it very easy for the staff to lay out the expectations for the students,” said Paxton, adding that the principal’s mantra is to “lead by example” and that the head of the school leaves his phone in his office.
The staff also helped each other out, with Paxton saying he occasionally stepped into the class next door.
“From the front of the room, it's very difficult to see the back of the room, especially if the student’s got a cellphone in their lap,” he said. “If I pop my head in and see a kid on a phone, I just kind of walk up, take it from them, give it to the teacher at the front, and then they’d do the same.”
“We just supported each other, making sure the students couldn't get away with it, and once they recognized that, that's when it really actually started to change,” Paxton said.
He said the effects were “very noticeable” and that he’s seen an uptick in social interaction.
“They actually started having conversations with each other, and it actually started translating to conversations in the hallway, and they're actually interacting socially again, which … was just incredible to see,” he said.
“There's definitely the pushback at the beginning, like how dare you take away what's mine and all that kind of stuff,” said Paxton. “But once it came out of their hands, and they felt the benefits themselves, it became easier and easier for us, because I think they recognized how much better it was for them.”
‘Inconsistent results’: union leader
OSSTF President Karen Littlewood called last year’s cellphone announcement from the government a “lovely distraction from what's really going on in education.”
“There’s an inconsistent approach, and of course, inconsistent results across the province,” she said. “Where it's working is where you have an administrator, a principal, who really made it clear right from the start — these are the expectations, these are the consequences, and we're here for learning, and we will be supporting that.”
She said it isn’t making a difference “where an administrator has just said, ‘Well, you know, you figure it out in your classroom.’”
Warda, president of OSSTF’s District 14 teachers’ bargaining unit, echoed this, saying the results of the ban have been a mix.
He likened the ban to a New Year’s resolution, noting there was an “erosion” of enforcement and following of the new rules.
“So we're disappointed, because I think it hasn't finished the year as strong as it started the year,” he said. “The school that was already doing it with staff support, with parents understanding the importance of all of this stuff, that school did better and kept at it better than the other schools who were just dropped into it at the last second.”
He acknowledged that it’s “a huge social change” that won’t “happen overnight.”
“I think the fix is a co-ordinated response,” he said, adding that this includes consistently reminding students “how good it was when they weren't on their phone during the day and they were able to learn better and maybe connect with friends at school.”
The president of the Ontario Public School Boards' Association (OPSBA), which supported the ban, said many school boards had already implemented similar policies. The provincial policy, Kathleen Woodcock said, “helped our educators and administrators to implement the cellphone ban that they may already have had in place.”
Woodcock said while the policy for schools is great, it’s “only part of the larger issue.”
“What happens when they go home? … the risks are still there for them, even though it's not a risk to learning and not a distraction to learning,” she said of the effects of social media on the mental health of students, adding that she’s tried to limit her personal cellphone and social media usage.
Woodcock said that OPSBA, in partnership with the Canadian School Boards Association, have met with the Public Health Agency of Canada “to outline our concerns and to advocate for a national public health guidance on cellphones.”
A “co-ordinated, evidence-based strategy is what we need so that we can get some data,” she said.
In response to questions about the impact of the province’s cellphone rules or any data the government has collected related to it, the government said it was “encouraged” by what it’s heard so far.
“We’ve been encouraged by the feedback we've received so far from educators, parents, and students that removing cellphones has been a welcome change contributing to better learning and improved student outcomes,” Emma Testani, a spokesperson for Education Minister Paul Calandra said.
“As we close out the first full year of implementation, we will continue gathering input to understand how the policy has worked in practice, where it has been effective, and where further support may be needed.”
—With files from Christina Chkarboul, Penny Coles, Melanie Hennessey, Joy Sanguedolce and Julie Slack
