Depending on whom you ask, the pervasive use of cellphones in schools might be termed a nuisance.
A distraction.
For Karen Smith, it’s a matter of life and death.
Smith knows that an Instagram post likely played a role in her son’s murder.
“It wasn’t able to be admitted in court,” said Smith, whose son Jasiah was killed in March 2023, “but there were some cellphone things.”
That summer, Fredericksburg City Schools Superintendent Marci Catlett was reeling from two murders in three months involving current or former city students. At the end of one particularly draining workday, a despondent Catlett called Smith from the parking lot.
“I said, ‘Karen, what can I do?’” the superintendent recalled during a recent interview. “And the first thing out of her mouth was, ‘Take the cellphones away.’”
Two years later, they’ve done just that.
Smith appeared in a video entitled, “Off, Yondr, and Away” that was played at the Dec. 2 school board meeting to provide an update on the division’s cellphone-free policy, which went into effect at the start of this school year.
“I just know that bad things can happen in an instant, and taking the cellphones away could eliminate a lot of that,” she said.
‘It’s so quick’
While Smith had just a short cameo in the video, she played a not-insignificant role in inspiring the city’s policy, which was developed in large part over the summer ahead of a mandate from Gov. Glenn Youngkin. This past July, Youngkin issued Executive Order 33, requiring local school divisions to implement cellphone-free policies by Jan. 1, 2025.
Smith said she knew that Jasiah was experiencing cyberbullying and other issues related to his phone usage.
But the extent of the devices’ hold on the social lives of her son and his classmates only crystallized following his death.
“I just told her to take the cell phones away because that’s how they’re communicating,” she said. “That’s how word spreads so quickly. When something happened with my son, how did someone know to come to my door? Like it’s just like that, you know, with phones, it’s so quick.”
James Monroe High School Assistant Principal Nick Brousse agrees. In the FCPS video, Brousse stated that the division already experienced a decrease in bullying. One possible reason?
The lack of an audience.
“When an altercation happens, there’s no video footage of it that can instantly be shared or airdropped with the entire school,” he said. “So things are isolated, and then we quickly deal with them, move on and get back to focusing on learning.”
While FCPS has relied primarily on anecdotal feedback thus far, the division said it will analyze a set of metrics this spring and plans to release another video to update the public.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that we’re going to see increased academic achievement in students,” Deputy Superintendent Matt Eberhardt said. “We’re going to see data that showed kids achieved more, because they’re focused on learning.”
‘An addictive behavior’
During the 2023-24 school year, FCPS implemented a policy forbidding cellphone use in classrooms but permitting it in common areas and between classes.
In Fredericksburg — as well as other divisions across the state that attempted similar half-measures — it didn’t work.
“We thought that students would have enough self-control and discipline for this addiction that they’d be able to turn them off and on,” Catlett said. “I mean, we gave everybody the benefit of the doubt. But it’s an addictive behavior.”
School board member Kathleen Pomeroy (Ward 2) said she had a surefire way of confirming that the 2023-24 policy hadn’t achieved its aims.
“Kids still had their phones out. The reason I know that is that because my own children were texting me during the school day,” she said with a laugh.
Eberhardt presented the framework for a 100% cell-phone free policy to the school board in June, and later that month, the division hosted approximately 40 teachers and administrators for a “working lunch” to solicit their input.
The school board unanimously approved its new policy on July 1. Elementary school students are not permitted to have cell phones (otherwise referred to as personal communication devices or PCDs), while middle and high school students must have phones turned off and placed in locking Yondr pouches.
Students are expected to place their locked devices in their backpacks upon entering the school building, and unlocking devices are found near most exits.
“We expected war on the first day of school,” Eberhardt said. “That’s the term I used. We thought there was going to be a battle when kids came to school on that first day. And there was no battle.”
A close call
With a policy in place, just one piece was missing.
“We’re ready to go, but we need the Yondr bags,” Catlett said.
Yondr, the manufacturer of the cell phone pouches and the magnetic locking devices required to utilize them, had a growing backlog of orders, from school divisions in the U.S. to Australia.
Catlett’s administrative team, which included Eberhardt, Brousse, and Kisha Frye, tried everything to expedite the process. Still, the earliest shipment, the division was told, would arrive sometime in October.
“We would have had to start with envelopes,” Catlett said. “The kids would have laughed us out of the building.”
So Catlett made one last-ditch effort to secure the coveted pouches. On July 10, she reached a Yondr sales rep in New York named Jennifer and did her best to pull rank.
“I guess in New York, superintendent feels like a really big deal, right?” she recalled. “Not so much here, but she thought I was somebody big.”
Big enough, apparently, to arrange a 10 a.m. Zoom call. Catlett used the opportunity to not only explain what FCPS needed — but why they needed it.
“I said, ‘Jennifer, I need to tell y’all a story,’” Catlett recalled.
She told them about the murders, and about her efforts a year earlier to obtain advanced weapon detectors to assuage the fears of a still-grieving community.
And she recounted what Karen Smith told her in the parking lot that day.
“I told the story about Jasiah’s mom telling me, ‘If you want to turn this around, take the phones away.’”
About an hour later, Catlett received a text from Jennifer. It read: “Hey Marci, we will ship immediately.”
For her part, Smith is happy her story helped move the needle, however immeasurably. She even mentioned her advocacy for a cellphone-free policy in her victim impact statement, which was considered by the court prior to the November sentencing of the two men, Aaron Carter and Lorenzo Brooks, who were convicted of second-degree murder in Jasiah’s death.
“It makes me feel like I did it, like I made that program happen,” she said. “Even though I know I didn’t do it, it makes me feel like I made that happen. It makes me feel like that they’ll have a chance to be able to be seen as kids.”
