Schools are limiting how and when teens can use their phones. But some students say: Maybe give us a heads up first and ask what we think?

Every morning, before she even reaches her first class, a fourth-year student at LaGuardia High School in New York City performs the same routine. Lucy takes out her phone, slides it into a small fabric pouch and watches it lock shut. For the rest of the day, it stays there.

“I take my phone, I put it in the pouch and I don’t have access to it throughout the school day,” Lucy said.

The pouches are made by a company called Yondr, and they have become a familiar fixture in schools across New York City following a citywide phone restriction policy. To unlock them, students must walk to a demagnetizing station near the school’s front doors. During lunch, if they leave the building, they can pick up their phones. Otherwise, the pouch stays locked.

When Lucy first heard the policy was coming, she was skeptical it would actually happen. Then it did.

“I was a little angry and shocked,” she said. “I feel like we rely on our phones so much.”

What struck her most was not the loss of her phone, but the way the decision had been made. Nobody had asked students for their input.

Denying access to phones

Lucy is far from alone in that feeling. By late 2024, smartphone access among U.S. teens had reached near-universal levels, with 95% reporting owning or having access to a smartphone, up from just 73% a decade earlier. The phone in a teenager’s pocket is no longer a novelty. For most, it is a lifeline. 

For many students, the adjustment has been more emotional than academic. Lucy said the restriction had not dramatically changed her ability to focus in class. She was not a student who abused her phone in the first place, she said.

What bothered her more was the feeling behind the policy. “It felt like an overreaction to an individual problem,” she said.

She described a school where students could still find plenty of ways to disengage if they wanted to: falling asleep, switching between tabs on their laptops, doing work for other classes. Removing phones, she argued, did not automatically create attention.

“It doesn’t directly increase participation,” she said.

Opposition to a ban

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in September-October 2025, only about one in five U.S. teens supported banning cellphones for the entire school day, with 73% opposing a full-day ban.

Even on the narrower question of classroom-only bans, teens are divided, with roughly half in opposition.

Socially, the changes were noticeable but not devastating. Before the ban, Lucy and her friends would text between classes to coordinate lunch plans or check in throughout the day. Now, those threads of contact are gone. But she found she could adapt.

“I’m still able to see them in the hallways and just talk face to face,” she said.

What lingered, though, was a different kind of discomfort. Something closer to anxiety. Research from Pew has found that 44% of teens say being without their phone makes them feel anxious. For Lucy, that number was personal.

“I feel nervous and anxious about being separated from my phone,” she said. “It’s my main point of contact with my parents and the outside world. I don’t think it’s really necessary to remove it completely.”

Students left out of the process

What frustrated Lucy most was not the policy itself, but the process behind it. Students, she said, were never consulted.

“There wasn’t really any interaction with the students at my school,” she said. “There was no intermediate step between having complete access to our phones and having them completely locked away.”

If she could design the policy herself, she would leave it to individual teachers to set rules for their own classrooms. That way, restrictions could be tailored, proportional and humane.

“I would have individual teachers make their own policies,” she said. “Rather than the state making a complete ban.”

LaGuardia is a public school. A few miles away, The Hewitt School had recently introduced its own phone locker system. That’s the school I attend. There, the situation looked different from behind an administrator’s desk.

From the other side of the lanyard

At Hewitt, the school’s Dean of Students had watched phone use escalate for months before the policy changed. Teachers noticed students on their phones in hallways, the library and lounges. But few actually enforced the rules.

“The faculty did not want the conflicts with the students,” the dean said. “They didn’t want to create extra tension.”

Her experience mirrors a national pattern. A Pew Research Center survey found that 72% of high school teachers say students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom. Yet knowing something is a problem and being willing to enforce consequences for it are two different things.

At Hewitt, that gap had become impossible to ignore.

The school already had a policy requiring students to keep phones in their bags. On paper, it existed. In practice, it was largely ignored. The new system requires students to lock their phones in cases upon entering school, with keys kept on lanyards with their IDs.

Students were not consulted before the change.

“No,” the dean said simply, when asked whether students had been given input on the locker idea.

A sweeping new policy

Three days into the new policy, compliance was high. Only two phones had been confiscated. Students, for the most part, were going along with it.

“Most students are just like, whatever,” the dean said. “It is what it is.”

She acknowledged that the timing helped. Implementing a sweeping new policy near the end of the school year tends to generate less resistance than doing so in September. She also anticipated that students would find workarounds, particularly through laptops.

“Technology allows for communication to happen via the computer as well,” she said.

Like many administrators navigating these decisions, she reflected on the balance between student independence and institutional responsibility. In an ideal world, she suggested, teenagers would be trusted to self-regulate. But systems depend on consistent follow-through from everyone in them, and when that follow-through does not happen, something has to give.

“Because that system wasn’t followed, the policy had to change,” she said.

Two views, the same tension.

This is a tension that plays out in schools everywhere: not between people who want different things, but between what is right in principle and what actually works in practice.

Set side by side, these two perspectives reveal something more complicated than a simple debate about phones.

Lucy sees an individual problem being solved with a collective punishment. She knows students who were genuinely distracted by their phones, but she also knows students who were not. A blanket ban, in her view, fails to account for that difference.

“I think if parents and administration had a completely accurate picture of what phone use looked like,” she said, “they wouldn’t find it necessary to completely ban it.”

The Hewitt dean sees a system that has stopped functioning and a community that needs a reset. She is thoughtful about the limits of what top-down policy can accomplish, but trusts that the team made the best decision available given the circumstances.

“Because that system wasn’t followed, the policy had to change,” she said. Both of them, in their own ways, are asking the same question: who gets to decide?

A global debate

What is striking about the wave of restrictions sweeping schools and governments is not just what they decide, but how they decide it.

Australia became the first country to enforce a nationwide ban on social media for children under 16 in December 2025, with companies facing fines of up to $50 million for failing to prevent underage accounts. New Zealand, Malaysia and several European countries are now weighing similar moves.

France, which has banned phones in primary and middle schools since 2018, is pushing to extend the ban to high schools. The legislation keeps expanding, and the momentum shows no sign of slowing.

But in nearly every case, the pattern is the same: adults make the call. Teenagers are the subject of these policies, but rarely their authors. The student in New York noticed it in her own school hallway.

Researchers and advocates are starting to notice it too. UNICEF Australia has argued that any changes should actively involve young people to ensure they actually help. So far, that standard is more aspiration than reality.

Hewitt’s dean of students makes the same distinction. She supported the idea of schools setting their own rules, but was wary of mandates handed down from above.

“I think schools should have the right to choose how they want to implement something like this independently,” she said. “Different communities have different needs.”

A question left open

At its core, the debate over phone policies in schools has never really been about phones. It is about who gets to define the problem, and who gets to design the solution.

Governments are acting. Schools are acting. And teenagers, for the most part, are being acted upon.

Lucy put it plainly. There was no intermediate step, no conversation, no gradual transition. One day she had her phone. The next day, it was locked in a pouch.

“There was no intermediate step,” she said. “No acclimatization.”

Maybe the policies are right. Maybe phones do need to go. But if the goal is to prepare teenagers for a world that requires judgment, responsibility and self-regulation, it is worth asking whether decisions made entirely without them are the best place to start.

For now, Lucy walks in every morning, locks up her phone and waits for lunch.

Questions to consider:

1. How could a school involve students in decision making?

2. Why do you think that organizations leave young people out of decision-making processes?

3. Can you think of a time you felt you should have been consulted before a rule was imposed on you?

The views and citations expressed by this student journalist are their own and not those of their school or any person or organization affiliated or doing business with their school.

Sophie de Lavandeyra is in her final year of high school at The Hewitt School in New York City. She serves as captain of the debate team and a member of the Hewitt Action Research Collective, and is the founder and captain of the school’s dance team. Outside the classroom, she trains in competitive dance and enjoys playing piano in her free time.