Spokane Public Schools banned cellphones in every classroom and hallway across the district, and students didn’t just adjust to the silence — they started asking what else there was to do.
“This is not just about an iPhone is distracting you from your science textbook,” Adam Swinyard, Superintendent of Spokane Public Schools, told Education Week. “This is bigger than that. We want them to grow into adults that value in-person relationships and connections.”
As students head back to class this fall, cellphone restrictions are no longer the exception — at least 38 states and Washington, D.C. now require schools to limit or ban phones during the day, according to Patch, and most of those rules arrived in just the past two years. Movieguide® has tracked this shift since it began, from Texas’s classroom-wide ban to the nationwide bandwagon of states following suit.
Spokane went further than most, and it’s now a case study other districts are watching. When the ban rolled out in 2022, officials braced for pushback over the silence. What they got instead, per Education Week, was a wave of kids with nowhere to put their restless afternoons.
The district’s answer was “Engage IRL,” a push to flood after-school hours with clubs, sports and activities substantial enough to actually compete with a phone. It worked better than anyone expected — district-sponsored activities jumped from 130 in the 2022-23 school year to more than 1,000 two years later, and student participation climbed by more than 30 percentage points.
Related: Students Praise School Phone Ban: ‘My Attention Has Skyrocketed’
The numbers behind that shift are hard to argue with. Chronic absenteeism among students who joined an activity fell to 20%, compared with 34% for those who didn’t. A $3.4 million grant from the local nonprofit LaunchNW helped cover startup costs, though Spokane has still spent more than $1.1 million of its own money keeping the momentum going.
Rylin Frasca-Roberts felt the difference firsthand. “My freshman year, I would just go on the bus, go back home, do homework, and then rot away on my phone,” the Ferris High School junior said. “Now…on club days, I’m here. I’m playing games and I’m being social.”
Not every student found the mandate freeing. Teddy Osborne, a senior at Ferris High School, was candid about the tension built into forcing engagement. “Being forced to do it makes us want to do it less, to be honest,” he said.
Glover Middle School Principal Michael Stark put the shift in blunter terms. “Before we had this laser-like focus on getting kids off their stupid devices and giving them more real-world things to do, we spent all day long playing defense,” he said. Now, he added, the school is finally “on offense.”
People were built for a kind of fellowship no app can replicate, and Spokane’s experiment suggests kids feel that pull even when they can’t name it. For Christian parents wrestling with their own household’s phone habits, the takeaway isn’t complicated: take away the distraction, put something real in its place and don’t be surprised when your kids choose the real thing.
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