Smartphones at School: How they affect students’ mental health

MESA COUNTY, Colo. (KKCO) – On average, children spend about 9 hours on their phones during the day, 5 hours of those hours on social media.

Since the early 1990s, the world has been slowly consumed by technology. Smartphones allow anything to be accessed at the click of a button.

Over the past decade, there has been an increase in the negative effects smartphones are having on young people’s mental health, even in Mesa County.

“I feel like a lot of times with social media, I’m not there as much as I should be,” said Maddox Rewold, a Palisade High School student. “I’m always looking at other people’s rules and things they’ve written, and I’m not really living my life.”

“I always depended on my phone. “I was there 24/7,” said Kolhter Howard, a senior at Palisade High School. “I wasn’t talking to my family. I was sitting there on my phone and not working properly in my time.”

These effects are also seen at the district and district level.

“Some of the things that happen are dangerous obstacles, bullying and other threats. All of this is harmful to the learning environment,” said Phil Weiser, Attorney General of Colorado.

“The study really shows, young people in general, but especially that kind of students from elementary to middle school are not able to control themselves,” said Dr. Brian Hill, District 51 Superintendent. It affects their sleep, it affects their attention in class, the time they spend with friends and socializing.

Hali Nurnberg, a licensed counselor at the Counseling and Education Center, says this also affects parents.

“Parents feel really left out now. It’s also because of the social media, which holds itself to high standards of injustice and the way they raise children,” he said. They do hard work, raise children, balance life. , they know how to pay the bills, put food on the table and all the things they do. And the phone becomes a distraction that interferes with their ability to have time.”

District 51, with the help of the Western Colorado Community Foundation and the Attorney General’s office, has implemented a new smartphone strategy to combat this growing problem.

“Our campaign slogan is ‘More Social, Less Media’. So we’re trying to find a way to reduce that amount of social media, use technology, and increase social interaction,” Hill said. “All middle and high school classrooms have and some kind of storage device, it could be a phone case, we have 4 schools that use Yonder bags that actually lock the phones in the bag.”

These policies went into effect in August 2024, and have already been received with praise from students.

“People are starting to use their phones a lot now,” Howard said. each other.”

There are also others who miss using their phones as tools, rather than entertainment.

“It’s definitely a tool in the classroom when there aren’t enough calculators around, you have your phone when you need research tools that aren’t available on Chromebooks, your phones are tools good for that,” said Rewold.

The limited use in schools also carried over into their lives outside of school.

“I usually don’t see my phone, it sounds crazy, but now I use it as a form of communication rather than a form of entertainment,” Rewold said.

District 51 does not want the war to stop here.

“We want to make sure that we also teach the children as we go along. Because when they are adults, they are on their own, will they be able to be responsible with those tools?,” said Hill.

“They’re working from the playbook here. I want to make sure we get the word out and that other school districts follow suit,” Wesier said.

“The stronger we can build bonds in our community, the healthier we will be as individuals, as families and as a community,” Nurnberg said.

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