On the rare occasions Rundlett Middle School principal Jay Richard takes his phone out during the school day, his students hound him.

“Mr. Richard, we’re not supposed to be on phones during school,” they gleefully remind him.

But Richard needs no reminding. Rundlett is a completely phone-free school because he made it one.

Before last school year, when Richard became principal at the Concord school, students could carry their phones during the school day in their backpacks or in their pockets.

But Richard, who has undergone his own evolution with respect to technology, overhauled the rule: phones must now stay in students’ lockers from the moment they arrive at school until the moment they leave.

“Even if we just allowed them to carry them, I believe they’d be tempted to use them,” he said. “What we’re learning is that we want our kids’ school experience to be more about a hands-on approach and less technology than it was even several years ago.”

Up the road at Concord High School, the rule – and the logic behind it – differs: students must put their devices away during class but may use them elsewhere as they please. On a recent morning this week, practically every student peered down at their phone as they passed through the main lobby.

“At the high school level, eventually they’re going into the workforce; they’re going out into college and careers,” said Concord High Principal Tim Herbert. “They’re going to be using this technology. How do you teach them to do it right?”

Answering that question has become a hot-button issue nationally as a new school year gets underway. In the last year, seven states have enacted laws that restrict phone use in public schools, while another 14 are considering similar legislation, according to the policy organization KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation.

New Hampshire is not one of them – and many politicians here believe that should remain the case.

Gov. Chris Sununu said in a statement through a spokesperson that school phone policies “are best left to local districts.” Legislators from both parties who serve on the House and Senate Education Committees said they felt the same way and noted they had yet to receive any bills that sought to govern school phone use statewide.

The lack of statewide guidance means that school districts – and even specific schools within a district, as Concord demonstrates – have the freedom to arrive at vastly different places when evaluating the role personal electronic devices should play.

An unscientific survey of five area schools, however, found that – outside of Rundlett – they have arrived at roughly the same place, with only slight variations.

Merrimack Valley, Bow, Kearsarge Regional, and Concord High School all prohibit phones during classes but allow them during other points in the school day. All four high schools have revised their phone policies within the past three years and all have purchased some sort of restrictive holding devices for phones, such as pouches, cabinets, and lockers. The widest variation between the four high schools revolves around whether the placement of phones in the storage containers during class is mandatory versus optional.

A new rule goes into effect

Erik Anderson began teaching biology at Kearsarge Regional High School in 2000, long before cell phones – much less smartphones – were ubiquitous.

He experienced the proliferation of the flip phone followed by the explosion of the iPhone a decade ago.

Smartphones “just kind of hit like a tidal wave,” Anderson recalled in an interview this week.

But it was really the pandemic and its aftermath – a period during which technology and teaching grew inextricably linked – that convinced Anderson of the need for a course correction.

“The kids would regularly just have their phones out on their desks,” Anderson said of the post-pandemic years. “They’d be getting notifications on things all the time.”

What concerned Anderson most was the social repercussions: during times in which students used to chat with each other, such as during study hall, “they would just be sitting there, plugged in, staring at their phones.”

Something had to change.

Anderson helped convene a committee of school educators last spring. They conducted a school-wide survey, and found that 90% of teachers were concerned phone use was negatively impacting students’ academic and social skills.

The rule they settled on, which went into effect at the beginning of this school year, is the most stringent of the four high schools surveyed: In all academic spaces, students must put their phones in little cabinets for the duration of the class, unless a teacher explicitly allows the phones for an academic purpose.

In the first weeks of the school year, the new rule has garnered grumbles from students, Anderson said, with some arguing that they should have a right to hold on to their property.

But Anderson said he has already noticed improvement in his classes.

“I’m seeing them less distracted with phones, because they don’t have them,” he said.

Still, high schoolers are clever and Anderson wonders how much of classroom phone time has simply transferred to time on students’ school-issued computers, which are still allowed.

“Where they were using their phone to play games, they could be using their Chromebooks to play games,” he said. “I can’t be monitoring all the screens all the time.”

An outright ban?

High school teachers and administrators largely agreed that a total ban on phones in schools like the one at Rundlett and those increasingly enacted elsewhere would not make a lot of sense.

“Our philosophy so much here – and this is really one of the reasons that brought me here – is . . . about building a positive school culture and collaborating,” said Brenda Barth, the vice principal of Bow High School, which put in place a new phone rule last year. “I think our students have responded well to this transition, so we haven’t – at this point in time – needed to go that route.”

At Merrimack Valley High School, which has the most lenient rule of the four high schools surveyed, principal Sam York said he sees value in students being able to communicate with each other during school.

“Their major form of communication is social media, and it’s good for kids to stay connected to one another through social media in a positive way, so we’re okay as long as they’re using it wisely during the school day,” York said.

Another issue that commonly arises is the necessity to communicate with parents regarding pickup logistics or family responsibilities throughout the day. At Rundlett, students have access to a phone in the office, which about a dozen students take advantage of each day, Richard said. At the high school level, where students have a host of other obligations, that gets more complicated.

High schoolers have jobs, pointed out Herbert, the Concord High principal.

“Bosses have called and left messages: ‘Can you pick up a shift in the afternoon?’” he said.

Some parents also say they want their children to have phones in the event of emergencies at school, such as a school shooting, but the thinking on whether having a phone actually makes students safer is mixed.

What do students think?

A rule is only as strong as it is enforceable, and some school leaders believed obtaining buy-in from students for a total ban – even if it could benefit them – would be next to impossible.

Students at Concord High largely agreed.

A total phone ban “just seems very restrictive,” said senior Georgia Nolan, who felt she and her classmates were responsible enough to know when and when not to use their phones.

Nolan, and nearly all the other Concord high students interviewed, felt the current rule was a good one.

“I don’t mind,” said senior Nino Rodriguez. “I’m not addicted to my phone so I can last a class without a phone.”

Junior Jaiden Smith said he didn’t like the rule because music helps him study, but he acknowledged it was “respectable.”

“Usually when I’m trying to work, I listen to music to relax me, so trying to do it without it kind of sucks because I can’t focus as much,” Smith said.

For the younger students who came from Rundlett before the era of principal Richard – or from other schools with total bans – Concord’s more lenient rule required an adjustment – albeit a quick one.

“It was definitely weird to get used to, and I felt weird when I was using my phone in front of teachers, but now I’m used to it,” said Magnolia Boulton, who attended middle school in Deerfield.

What do legislators think?

One would be hard-pressed to find a national issue with more bipartisan consensus than school phone use.

Florida led the way last year, passing a law that bans phone use during instructional time in public schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. The states that have since followed suit range from Republican-controlled Louisiana and Indiana to Democrat-controlled Minnesota. (Not all states have passed blanket bans; Minnesota, for example, requires school districts to adopt policies, but does not prescribe what they say.) New York’s Kathy Hochul was the most recent governor to indicate support for a state-wide ban.

In New Hampshire, a state that prizes itself on local control, little appetite exists to jump on the bandwagon.

“I’d like to see this being done on the school district level, bringing this decision back to the municipalities, not the state get into it, because I think that may not be necessary,” said Republican state Sen. Ruth Ward, the chair of the Senate Education Committee.

Rep. David Luneau, a Democrat on the House Education Committee and a former chair of the Hopkinton School Board, agreed with Ward. When it comes to contentious issues in schools, he said the state has a responsibility to step in when health and safety is concerned, as it did when it mandated masks in schools during the pandemic, but that phone use doesn’t necessarily rise to that level.

“In the case of phones, different communities might have different needs on it, and I don’t see it as a public health situation,” Luneau said.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.