What has affected teen lives more: cell phone use or procedures and protocols that regulate cell phone use especially in schools? This question comes up in a lot of conversations in NYC public schools. The most popular cell phone restriction so far in NYC schools are the Yondr pouches which were established in NYC public schools in 2023 and more than 41 states spent over 2.5 million dollars to purchase Yondr pouches.
What is a Yondr pouch? It’s actually pretty simple. A Yondr pouch was introduced in 2014 as a method to keep students away from their phones throughout the school day. At the beginning of the day students place their phones into Yondr pouches which are locked using a special magnet. At dismissal, school officials unlock the Yondr pouches.
In Mr.Vadim’s Journalism class we were interested to see whether or not our peers were interested in the idea of Yondr pouches so, we made a survey to see whether or not they were interested. 92.9% of students knew what the Yondr pouches were, 92.9% of students said they didn’t want Yondr pouches and 78% of students thought that they were not effective in the school building. This shows how the fellow students here at Leadership do not believe Yondr pouches actually prevent inappropriate phone usage.
One of the students said,
After concluding our yondr pouch survey its safe to say the students here at Leadership and Public Service High School think Yondr pouches are invasive as well as ineffective because we still have access to devices. This reveals how the students here believe Yondr pouches to be violating our personal rights and dangerous and how it’s believed to not be effective to stop phone usage during school hours. A way to solve this problem is to leave students be, it’s on them if they want to prioritize school or not.
