Originally founded to make concerts a phone-free environment, Yondr pouches have since moved into schools to keep phones away from students’ reach.
These pouches have been instituted to address the “phone issue” in schools at an increasing rate, but they lack a supportive solution and the spread of them needs to stop.
Every morning in schools all around Dallas, and in 27 other countries, students put their phones, headphones, smart watches, etc into these magnetized pouches. They are then closed through a magnet, and can only be opened with stations around the school on their way out of the building.
But, as students do, they find ways around putting their phones away. The pouches have been burned, cut open, and filled with fake phones because the pouches weren’t meant to be forceful: they were meant to be used voluntarily. The pouches simply can’t handle the wear and tear of teenagers who are forced to use them because they weren’t designed to be in a school.
The pouch design doesn’t take into account the many emergencies that can happen in a school. What if there’s some kind of personal emergency? What is a student supposed to do if their phone is locked up, and can only be opened by the large magnet near the front of the school? The answer is just about nothing.
In the case of a school shooting, students not only can’t call 911, but they can’t call their parents or their family. Or even in a less serious case of a parent needing to get in contact with their student, they are unable to without calling the school to tell them to tell their students, which seems not only overly complicated but potentially embarrassing for students.
The vocal number of parents and educational staff who don’t want phones in school often hold this belief because they think that phones distract from work and that social media is causing too much harm to students in school. And while this is true, and there certainly are issues of students spending time on their phones instead of school work, forcing students to put their phones in pouches has not been proven to stop the negative effects of social media. It is an overly-simplistic solution to a very complicated problem.
Here at the school, the solution to phone distractions is for students to put them in a shoe rack at the beginning of the period and take them out at the end. While some may find this practice unproductive since it fails to hold students accountable for putting up their phones, when attendance is counted with the presence of your phone in the shoe pouch, it becomes a much more effective solution.
This workaround allows students to have their phones during passing periods, study halls, and lunches, which in turn allows students to access their phones in emergency situations. Though this might limit social interaction, it can also help it. There are students who have a hard time fitting in at any school you go to, who get through the day because they can message people outside of school.
Additionally, let’s not forget that social media and phones are just as much of a tool as a distraction. For many classes students use their phones for school work like math, or as a replacement for a laptop they might have left at home. This is why an “all or nothing” solutions like Yondr pouches are not the right answer.
The pouches themselves cost $30, so for an average 2,000-person school, the district must cough up $60,000. Plus, if something does happen to a student’s Yondr pouch, they have to pay to replace it.
The Yondr pouch solution fails to implement a sense of responsibility in students, and a sense of autonomy and fails to create a long-term solution. There are students who own Macbooks that will still be able to text even without a phone, and every laptop can access Instagram and Snapchat.
Instead, schools should look to adopt the practice of putting phones up at the beginning of every class. It will save the school their $60,000 and districts won’t have to worry about inefficient safety procedures and lazy solutions that Yondr would provide.
