Aweek or so ago, the state legislature passed a bill that was signed into law banning cellphones while students are in school. We can all thank the Pine Bluff School District for leading the way on that notion.
The district had already applied for and is expecting to receive a $55,000 grant to buy locking pouches for cellphones to keep them out of students’ hands during the school day.
The pouches have been purchased but are not being used yet. Officials are still discussing the protocol. But come the 2025-26 school year, students will be checking their cellphones at the door or otherwise not seeing them for the rest of the day.
One doesn’t have to look very far to find that respected publications and entities have determined that an overabundance of social media exposure is not a healthy environment for young people.
Two years ago, the United States surgeon general released an advisory called Social Media and Youth Mental Health that said there is evidence that the mental health of young people is suffering from the effects of social media. Not long after that, the American Psychological Association issued a health advisory on the same topic.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
We applaud state lawmakers for heeding the warnings of the surgeon general and the APA as well as applaud the Pine Bluff school officials for quickly taking matters into their own hands and getting started on addressing the problem.
The issue is similar to other bad inputs with young people. Youngsters just aren’t fully matured. Their brains don’t work in the same way that an adult’s brain works. That’s why they make an inordinate amount of bad and/or impulsive decisions. It’s why society doesn’t allow youngsters to buy alcohol. Too much social media can create problems sleeping for them and cause depression and self-worth issues as well as interrupt emotional and behavioral maturity.
And even if there were no significant mental health issues associated with social media use, kids are in school, not to keep one or both eyes on their cellphones while in class, but to focus on the subject at hand.
“Based on research we’ve been reading with ‘The Anxious Generation,’ which is the book the governor has been promoting — and we were reading that as a district to hear the different things that social media has caused for our students and our generation — with that in mind, we started looking at the opportunity to purchase cellphone pouches,” Superintendent Jennifer Barbaree said during a recent school board meeting.
That roar we hear in the distance may be coming from teachers. Getting a student to pay attention has never been easy, but removing one of the biggest distractions — cellphones, with their lure of social media updates and texts and emails and photos — will likely make the instructors’ jobs much easier.
And maybe those hours away from their phones will give students the wherewithal to walk away from at least some social media interactions on their own time. It would be the healthy thing to do.