BY KELIN MARK
This fall, the hallways sound different. Indiana schools are now operating under stronger restrictions on student cellphone use, and the students who once checked texts between classes, scrolled through lunch and kept earbuds in all day are being asked to put their devices away.
As a principal, I understand why. For years, teachers have competed with notifications, group chats, videos and games for our students’ attention. School leaders like me have spent countless hours untangling conflicts that started on a screen at midnight and walked into our hallways by first period. Getting phones out of students’ hands may well be necessary.
But as a Black principal and a Black father, I keep returning to a second question that our community cannot afford to skip. Now that we have taken the phones out of their hands, what are we putting back in?
Removing something from a child’s life does not replace what it provided. For many of our young people, that phone was also a group chat where they felt understood and a place to retreat when school felt like somewhere they were merely tolerated. Taking it away may reduce distraction, but it will not, by itself, create engagement, friendship, belonging or relationships with the adults in the building. That work has to be intentional.
Schools cannot legislate connection
Recent national research from Gallup found that more than four in 10 middle and high school students say school often does not feel interesting or like a good fit for their talents. About three in 10 say teachers do not regularly check in with them or recognize their strengths. When I read those numbers, I think about the Black students I have watched sit in the back of classrooms for years, capable and quiet, waiting for someone to notice them. We have spent a great deal of energy asking how to get young people to look up from their phones. The more important question may be what they will see when they do.
In more than two decades in schools, one lesson has held true for me: students connect to people before they connect to programs. A school can write a cellphone policy in an afternoon. It cannot write a relationship policy and expect relationships to follow. Connection has to be part of the strategy, planned and checked on like anything else we say we value.
If I were sitting with a faculty member today, I would start with one question. Can every student in this building name at least one adult who truly knows them beyond their grades? I do not mean an adult who recognizes their face, teaches their third-period class or knows their name because they keep getting sent to the office. I mean someone who knows what they love, what worries them and what they hope to become, and who notices when they walk in carrying a bad day. If we cannot answer that for every child, and especially for our Black sons and daughters, taking away a phone will not solve our bigger problem.
Our community must also ask a harder question plainly: who is getting written up for phone violations? We know from long experience that Black students are too often disciplined more harshly than their peers for the same behavior. If a policy meant to restore focus becomes one more path from the classroom to the office, we will have traded one problem for a worse one.
Give them somewhere to talk and somewhere to belong
Walk through almost any middle or high school cafeteria from the last several years and you would see five students at one table, all of them somewhere else, eyes fixed on screens. Now the screens are gone. We cannot simply hope our young people will suddenly know how to talk to one another. We have to make room for it. Advisory can become a real conversation instead of another academic block. Lunch can hold clubs, table talks and activities. Mentoring groups can give a student the same adult and the same small circle of peers every week. And the adults in our hallways can engage students instead of only supervising them. None of this requires a multimillion-dollar program. It requires adults deciding that connection matters.
Athletics figured this out a long time ago. I learned it as a college player and again as a coach. When a young person joins a team, a band, a choir, a robotics club or a theater cast, they gain a group, an identity, adults who know them and people who expect them to show up. Not every student is an athlete, but every student needs a place. So I would ask leaders to pull their participation data and look for the students who are not connected to anything. Then do not just offer activities; recruit students into them. Sometimes a young person only needs an adult to say, “I think you would be good at this. Come with me.”
Parents, this starts at our tables, too
Schools cannot carry this alone. It is easy for us as parents to support a cellphone restriction from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and then let our children spend six or seven uninterrupted hours on a device once they get home. If we believe our children need a healthier relationship with technology, that relationship has to change in our homes as well.
And just as at school, taking the phone away is only half the job. When we tell our children to put the phone down, we have to be ready to help answer the question that follows: then what? We can eat dinner together without devices, take a walk, shoot baskets in the driveway, play cards or cook something together. We can watch a game and actually talk during it, bring them along to see their grandparents, give them real responsibilities around the house and, every now and then, let them be bored.
Most of all, we can talk with them and ask questions that cannot be answered with “fine.” Instead of “How was school?” try asking what made them laugh today, who they sat with at lunch, or whether anybody had a tough day. Those conversations may feel awkward at first, and that is OK. Connection, like a jump shot, gets stronger with practice.
Something worth looking up for
Our young people are more digitally connected than any generation before them, yet being connected online and being known in person are not the same thing. A student can have 2,000 followers and still feel alone. A student can be in five group chats and still feel that nobody at school really knows them, still waiting for one adult to ask, “How are you really doing?”
Indiana has created a space where, for several hours each school day, many of our children will finally look up. When they do, they should see teachers who know them, classmates they can connect with and clubs, teams and mentors waiting for them. They should see a school where somebody notices when they walk through the door. And parents, when they look up at home, let’s make sure they see us too.
The goal was never simply to take phones out of our children’s hands. It was to put something more valuable in their place: conversation, community, purpose, presence and connection. If we are going to ask this generation to put their phones down, the adults around them, at home and at school, owe them something worth looking up for.
Kelin Mark, Sr. is an educator and contributing education columnist for the Indianapolis Recorder. Learn more at kelinmark.com.
Kelin Mark is an educator, consultant, and co-founder of The Dad Difference. Follow him on Instagram @assisttheprincipal. Visit his website at www.kelinmark.com.
