{"id":16624,"date":"2025-08-08T07:07:50","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T14:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16624"},"modified":"2025-08-13T23:01:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T06:01:01","slug":"inside-the-parent-led-movement-for-phone-free-schools-time-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16624","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Inside the Parent-Led Movement For Phone-Free Schools&#8221;, Time Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/author\/charlotte-alter\/\">Charlotte Alter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SENIOR CORRESPONDENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/section\/us\">U.S.<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/tag\/education\">EDUCATION<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>AUG 4, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A student uses their cell phone after unlocking the pouch that secures it from use during the school day at Bayside Academy in San Mateo, Calif. on Aug. 16, 2024.<em>Lea Suzuki\u2014San Francisco Chronicle\/Getty Images<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/api.time.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/phone-ban-school-kids.jpg?quality=85&amp;w=1800\" alt=\"Bay Area School Bayside Academy Has Phone Free Space\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Before she had four kids and moved to rural Vermont, Laura Derrendinger was a public-health nurse for Doctors Without Borders. She spent eight years in places like Kosovo, Sudan, and the Congo-Uganda border, treating children with preventable illnesses like cholera, malaria, and measles. She learned the best way to stop disease is before it begins, with \u201cupstream\u201d interventions to remove the pathogen from the environment.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These days, nearly two decades after her last field assignment, Derrendinger is taking on a new pathogen that she thinks affects nearly every child in America. \u201cIn malaria, the mosquito is the vector of disease,\u201d she says. \u201cHere, the phone is the vector that\u2019s carrying the disease of toxic online content.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Derrendinger is just one dedicated organizer in a growing constellation of parent-led groups working to break Big Tech\u2019s grip on children. She helps lead the Distraction Free Schools Policy Project, she\u2019s on the leadership council of Smartphone Free Childhood US, and she\u2019s a member of the Screen Time Action Network, ScreenStrong, Mothers Against Media Addiction, Tech Safe Learning Coalition, and the Vermont Coalition for Phone and Social Media Free Schools\u2014all interconnected organizations with overlapping membership and converging goals. Much of their advocacy is focused on pushing for the simplest way to address social-media addiction in kids: making American schools into phone-free environments.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two years ago, banning phones in schools seemed almost unthinkable. Now, thanks in part to parents\u2019 organizing efforts, support for phone-free schools is rising quickly levels in a country that can\u2019t seem to agree on much else. A Pew Research Center study in July&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/short-reads\/2025\/07\/16\/americans-support-for-school-cellphone-bans-has-ticked-up-since-last-year\/\">found<\/a>&nbsp;that 74% of U.S. adults now support preventing middle schoolers and high schoolers from using their phones during class, up from 68% last year, while 44% support banning phones for the entire school day, up from 36%. Roughly two-thirds of Americans think phone-free schools would improve students\u2019 social skills, grades, and behavior in class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Read More:&nbsp;<\/strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/7295323\/social-media-case-instagram-tiktok\/\">She Says Social Media Algorithms Led to An Eating Disorder. Now She&#8217;s Suing.&nbsp;<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>State lawmakers from both parties are listening. As of this summer, 37 states have banned cell phones and other internet-connected devices during class. About half of those states and D.C. are phone-free from \u201cbell-to-bell,\u201d which keeps kids from accessing their phones during lunch and between classes. Republican states like Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma have passed bell-to-bell laws, while deep-blue New York just became the largest state to go phone-free for the entire school day starting this fall.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cTo be frank, I thought we\u2019d be socializing the idea of phone-free schools with state legislators this year,\u201d says Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, one of the central organizations in the network of parents, educators, and advocates working to combat social-media addiction in kids. \u201cThe fact that so many of these bills have already passed is a testament to how quickly this movement is coming together and to how angry parents are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The rapid momentum reflects a growing understanding that phones and social media can present serious harms to kids\u2019 mental health and social development. So while some 14-year-olds get a phone for their birthday, Derrendinger got her son something she thought was much less dangerous: a chainsaw.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Parents have long<\/strong>&nbsp;sensed that smartphones were transforming childhood. But it\u2019s only recently that they\u2019ve finally had the language to describe what\u2019s happening. Last year, Jonathan Haidt\u2019s&nbsp;<em>The Anxious Generation<\/em>&nbsp;was published to broad acclaim. The book, which argues that smartphones and social media have transformed a \u201cplay-based childhood\u201d into what Haidt calls a \u201cphone-based childhood,\u201d has spent 70 weeks on the New York&nbsp;<em>Times<\/em>&nbsp;bestseller list, and spawned a grassroots movement and public-awareness campaign advocating for less screen time and more real-world independence for kids. Advocates who had been pushing to reduce screen time suddenly found themselves flooded with new volunteers.&nbsp;<em>\u201c<\/em>The momentum came from his book,\u201d says Kim Whitman, who co-leads Smartphone Free Childhood US. \u201cBut it\u2019s a lot of us moms out there doing the actual work. We\u2019re the boots on the ground, pushing it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the year since&nbsp;<em>The Anxious Generation&nbsp;<\/em>was published, parents formed a loose coalition of advocacy groups focused on pushing school administrators, superintendents, and state legislatures to make schools phone-free. Many of these groups are connected through Fairplay, an advocacy organization that was founded 20 years ago as the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. In 2017, Fairplay launched the Screen Time Action Network, which became an incubator for the movement to get phones out of schools.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At first, many dismissed worries about screen time as a vaguely crunchy domestic concern, like \u201cgentle parenting\u201d or the push for organic foods. That changed in 2020. Parents stuck at home with their kids during the COVID-19 pandemic saw their children\u2019s phone addiction firsthand. New research linked social media to a worsening mental-health crisis among kids and teenagers. After the movie&nbsp;<em>The Social Dilemma<\/em>&nbsp;was released in 2020, parents who had lost children to that mental health crisis began to find each other. Fairplay saw an influx of these so-called \u201csurvivor parents,\u201d who had lost children to harms encountered on social media. With Fairplay\u2019s help, those parents formed a group called Parents for Safe Online Spaces.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201c<em>The Anxious Generation<\/em>&nbsp;has turbocharged everything, but a lot of these pieces were coming together before that,\u201d says Golin of Fairplay. For years, parents faced a choice between exposing their kids to unknown dangers on social-media platforms or fighting a constant battle that would leave their kids isolated and miserable. \u201dThere\u2019s now community in resisting the phone-based childhood.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Derrendinger, Whitman, and their<\/strong>&nbsp;fellow advocate Deb Schmill first met through Fairplay\u2019s Screen Time Action Network. Every Wednesday at noon for the past six months, they lead a Zoom forum for parent-advocates from around the country, called Distraction Free Schools Policy Project. The group includes parents from 30 states, strategizing about everything from how to draft a bill to how to build relationships with state legislators to how to create local pressure to pass phone-free legislation in their states. The advocates all agree that \u201cbell-to-bell\u201d policies, rather than ones that allow students to use phones between class, are the best way to reduce distractions and break social media addictions.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The call begins with some quick housekeeping from Derrendinger, but the Zoom quickly fills with eager conversation. Some parents had questions: \u201cWhen they do bell-to-bell, what\u2019s the rule for teachers?\u201d asked one mom from Pennsylvania. Others had complaints about how the rules have been poorly enforced: \u201cThey\u2019re still allowing phones in backpacks,\u201d said a mom in New York, lamenting that her school district\u2019s policy \u201cbasically has no teeth to it.\u201d Another from Illinois reluctantly reported that her state\u2019s phone-free legislation had passed the Senate but stalled in the House. \u201cWhile you\u2019re figuring out what the solution should look like, kids out there are struggling,\u201d she said. \u201cParents are struggling. Schools are struggling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end of the call, Schmill announced the next steps. \u201cThe goal for next year is to find champions in the states that did not pass bell-to-bell. And that\u2019s best done in the summer,\u201d she explained. Derrendinger chimed in. \u201cSummertime is the best time to build these allies,\u201d she said. \u201cSee if you can have coffee and connect in a human way with some of these legislators.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After the meeting ends, Derrendinger sends a follow-up email to the group. It includes a call to action reminding members to speak to their local school board or state board of education. \u201cWe will get this fixed,\u201d Derrendinger writes in the email. \u201cRemember, we move fast and fix things!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For some of the moms dedicating themselves to changing the way kids interact with technology, the issue is deeply personal. Deb Schmill\u2019s daughter, Becca, died in 2020 after taking drugs that were laced with fentanyl. She was 18. Deb Schmill believes social media led to Becca\u2019s overdose, fueling a series of traumatic events that dramatically shaped her adolescence.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Becca was 15,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/apps.bostonglobe.com\/opinion\/graphics\/2022\/10\/teen-social-media-I-wont-see-my-daughter-grow-up\/\">according to her mother<\/a>, she was drugged and raped by a boy she and her friends had met on a group chat. In the months that followed, Deb Schmill says, Becca was the victim of revenge porn circulated around her high school via social media. \u201cThese two traumas within a couple months of each other sent her spiraling,\u201d Schmill says, causing Becca to develop addiction issues.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2020, Deb and Becca temporarily relocated to Maine to get away from Becca\u2019s drug dealer. \u201cWith her phone, she could just track down a drug dealer with social media and pick something up,\u201d Schmill recalls. \u201cIt was laced with fentanyl. And we lost her.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Over the years since, Schmill has struggled to make sense of the cascading tragedies that led to her daughter\u2019s death. In each trauma, she concluded, technology was partly to blame. Group chats made it easy for teens to connect with strangers, like the boy from another town who allegedly raped her. Without social media, \u201cthere wouldn\u2019t be a place for revenge porn where people can post the most humiliating moments of your life online,\u201d Schmill says. And when these traumas became too much for Becca, her mother says, her phone also gave her \u201ceasy access to drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Schmill runs the Becca Schmill Foundation, but is also an active member of many other groups. She is among the \u201csurvivor parents\u201d&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/22\/technology\/kosa-child-safety-online.html\">lobbying Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act<\/a>, which would create a \u201cduty of care\u201d making social-media companies legally required to prevent and mitigate harms on their platforms. The bill, known as KOSA, passed the Senate overwhelmingly last year before stalling in the House. (It was re-introduced in May.) \u201cA lot of these organizations are working on different pieces of the puzzle,\u201d Schmill says. \u201cBecause no one solution is going to fix this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>One day in the spring<\/strong>&nbsp;of 2023, Derrendinger invited Vermont state senator Terry Williams to her home before breakfast. They sat on her porch on a frigid morning, before Derrendinger\u2019s four kids woke up. Derrendinger blasted Williams, a Republican, with a \u201cfirehose\u201d of data about the dangers of screens for kids. A few months later, Williams was invited back; this time Derrendinger had also invited three other moms. As they drank lemonade and the children played in the yard, Derrendinger laid out their request for Williams. The parents had drafted a bill to make Vermont schools phone and social-media free. It was a bell-to-bell phone ban that also included other devices like smartwatches, and it forbade schools from communicating with students via social media. All Williams had to do was introduce it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Williams was skeptical at first. \u201cEverybody was against it,\u201d he says. Many parents wanted their kids to have phones at school so they could be reached if necessary. Teachers didn\u2019t want to have to enforce a state law. Still, Derrendinger\u2019s data on the subject was persuasive. She kept calling Williams about it. He agreed to co-sponsor the bill that Derrendinger and her group had drafted.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI said, \u2018Don\u2019t get your hopes up,\u2019\u201d Williams recalls. He would introduce it, he told the parents, but once it went into the relevant legislative committee, \u201cYou\u2019re pretty much on your own.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That was fine with Derrendinger\u2019s group. They had an army of advocates at the ready. The original bill failed in 2024, but the group revived it in 2025 with the help of Rep. Angela Arsenault, a Democrat who co-sponsored the new bill in Vermont\u2019s House of Representatives. Rep. Arsenault says the grassroots momentum from parent advocates was what got the bill over the finish line during a busy legislative season. \u201cI am certain that that bill moved this year because of the parent-led movement,\u201d she says. Williams says the public support was so overwhelming that his office got more than 1,500 emails urging him to support the bill, even though he was already a co-sponsor. \u201cIt was the local groups,\u201d he says. \u201cThey were relentless.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In June, Vermont passed two of the strictest laws in the nation regulating children&#8217;s access to technology. The first, Vermont\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/legislature.vermont.gov\/bill\/status\/2026\/S.69\">Age Appropriate Design Code<\/a>, establishes a \u201cduty of care\u201d for social-media companies to design their products with kids\u2019 safety in mind, bans design features like endless scrolling and targeted advertising, and requires platforms to verify ages of minors and give them the highest privacy settings by default\u2014essentially the statewide version of KOSA. The second, a statewide \u201cbell-to-bell\u201d&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/legislature.vermont.gov\/Documents\/2026\/Docs\/ACTS\/ACT072\/ACT072%20As%20Enacted.pdf\">phone and device ban in K-12 schools<\/a>, makes all Vermont schools phone-free throughout the entire school day. It also made Vermont the first state to prohibit schools (or sports teams or student councils) from using social media to communicate with students.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While some educators resisted, others were thrilled. Blake Fabrikant has seen the benefits of phone-free schools as the dean of students at The Sharon Academy, a small independent high school in Sharon, Vt. Starting in 2015, Fabrikant began to notice a change in the school\u2019s social dynamics. \u201cWhen students had free time, they were going on their phones instead of integrating with each other and building social skills,\u201d he says. Attention spans decreased. Students made fewer friends. The culture of the school started to atrophy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fabrikant had been pushing to go phone-free for years, but he finally got the school to implement a bell-to-bell phone ban in the summer of 2024. It was \u201ca tremendous success,\u201d he says. Grades are up, according to Fabrikant, and students are paying more attention in class without the temptation to check Instagram. \u201cTwo years ago you\u2019d walk through the hallways and kids would just be glued to their phones,\u201d he says. Now, &#8220;they&#8217;re going outside and playing volleyball together. A student brings a boombox to school and they all dance together.\u201d The benefits to students\u2019 academic and social advancement, Fabrikant says, have been \u201cexponential.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For these parents and advocates, phone-free schools are just the beginning. The broad consensus that phones are harming children has opened up a whole new range of possibilities. \u201cWe\u2019ve moved from arguing about whether there was a problem,\u201d says Fairplay\u2019s Josh Golin, \u201cto arguing about what the solutions are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by&nbsp;Charlotte Alter SENIOR CORRESPONDENT AUG 4, 2025 A student uses their cell phone after unlocking the pouch that secures it from use during the school day at Bayside Academy in San Mateo, Calif. on Aug. 16, 2024.Lea Suzuki\u2014San Francisco Chronicle\/Getty Images Before she had four kids and moved to rural Vermont, Laura Derrendinger was a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16624"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16632,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16624\/revisions\/16632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}